MATHURA/HATHRAS: With the 2017 Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections turning out to be a battle of turncoats, the BJP and ruling Samajwadi Party are sweating out with rebellions from within their ranks, while people at large are looking at the emerging caste equations to make their choices for their ballots.
With the din and bustle of the usual election time missing in the first phase of the polls on February 11 for 73 Assembly constituencies in UP due to strict norms imposed by the Election Commission, people are closely watching out moves of the political parties, as they discuss castes of the candidates and the war within the first family of the SP.
Ajay Kumar Poeiya had been the BJP MLA from the Govardhan Assembly constituency in Mathura for two terms. Now that he is in his 70s, Poeiya too believed that like senior BJP leaders, he too would get an opportunity to settle his son in politics to pass on the family legacy. He lobbied with the BJP in-charge for UP Om Mathur and state party coordinator and RSS man Sunil Bansal. But his efforts did not yield the desired results. And then he turned rebel against the party for which he had toiled for over four decades.
"My son Brajendra Poeiya is contesting the elections as an independent from the Baldev reserved constituency in Mathura. My supporters and BJP workers are working for my son. Om Mathur and Sunil Bansal gave more considerations to the money power than to loyalty to the party. Sons and daughters of big BJP leaders were given tickets, but I was denied the same consideration," Poeiya told Express with visible sadness in his eyes. His anger is more for the reason that the BJP fielded a former RLD leader Pooran Prakash from the Baldev constituency, which he had won in 2012 polls.
Devendra Sharma of the BJP had lost to the sitting Congress MLA Pradeep Mathur by a mere 400 votes in the 2012 UP Assembly elections from the Mathura constituency.
"Sharma has been a long term BJP worker with clean image. He is financially not strong. Locals had donated money to help him contest elections in 2012. He had lost polls by a margin of just 400 votes. But the BJP fielded Shrikant Sharma in his place just because he's close to the party chief Amit Shah. There is strong discontent among party workers for the manner in which Devendra Sharma has been humiliated," said Dilip Yadav, who keeps close eyes on politics in Mathura. Shrikant Sharma and Pradip Mathur are pitched against another turncoat Ashok Agarwal who quit SP to bag the RLD nomination.
In the neighbourhood Chaata Assembly constituency, the BJP is again banking on former BSP MLA Choudhary Laxni Narayan to make inroads into the RLD bastion and the Jat land. He is pitted against the sitting RLD MLA Tej Pal Singh even while locals see here a multi-cornered contest among the BSP nominee and industrialist Manoj Pathaka and Lok Mani Kant Jadon of the SP.
"The constituency elects a Jat and Thakur alternatively here. The BJP nominee is a Thakur and he was also a minister in the Mayawati cabinet in 2007. He has a clear edge here," said Ram Kishore Singh, a native of Chaata.
People in the Maat Assembly constituency appears to have lost count of number of political parties to which the sitting MLA Shyam Sunder Sharma has flocked to in the last two decades. He was also the one who helped Trinamool Congress to make a debut in the UP Assembly in 2012. But Sharma now has gone to the BSP and is up against Yogesh Nohwal of the RLD and Rajesh Choudhary of the BJP.
The SP appears to be giving a good company to the BJP in the battle against party rebels. In the Sikandra Assembly constituency in the Hathras district, Rakesh Singh Rana has rebelled against the chief minister Akhilesh Yadav. He is contesting against the official nominee Yashpal Singh Choudhary, who had earlier been an MLA with the BSP.
"We are faced with an irony since both Rana and Choudhary hail from our village Bisana. In the end, people will vote on caste lines even while the village of 4000 people is without school, college and primary health care facility," said Karmveer Singh, a farmer.
In the battle of turncoats, the people also appear struggling in keeping tracks of the candidates of the political parties. "Candidates have changed their parties so much that we are yet to identify who is contesting on which symbol. People in our village will sit down a few days before the elections to decide who deserves our votes. But castes of the candidates will be top most consideration in our decision," said Dori Singh, a farmer in Satoha village in Mathura.