LUCKNOW: A month after Samajwadi Party patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav passed away, leaving his Mainpuri Lok Sabha seat vacant, his son Akhilesh has chosen his wife Dimple as the party candidate to contest the bye-election due December 5.
Dimple, a former Kannauj MP in the state, will seek to hold the party’s 26-year grip over the Mainpuri seat. The daughter-in-law of ‘Netaji’ returns to active politics after she lost Kannauj to the BJP in the 2019 general election.
Akhilesh has preferred Dimple over others, such as his cousin Dharmendra Yadav and nephew Tej Pratap Yadav. Mainpuri has been an SP bastion since Mulayam’s parliamentary entry in 1996. Before that, he had limited himself to Assembly polls. Mulayam successfully contested the seat four more times in 2004, 2009, 2014 and 2019. In 2014, after victories from both Mainpuri and Azamgarh, Mulayam vacated Mainpuri and passed the baton to his grandnephew Tej Pratap.
Dimple has been MP twice from Kannauj in 2012 and 2014. In 2012, she was elected unopposed from the City of Perfumes as the seat fell vacant with Akhilesh taking over as UP CM. In 2014, she won it even under the saffron wave, trouncing BJP’s Subrat Pathak by over 19,000 votes. However, she ended up losing to Pathak in 2019 by 12, 353 votes.
After facing two bypoll shocks in Azamgarh and Rampur in June this year, the SP has treaded cautiously in Mainpuri. It weighed factors such as the sympathy wave after Netaji’s death and the caste equation to make the decision. In Mainpuri, caste is a dominant factor. This segment comprises five Assembly areas Bhogaon, Mainpuri, Kishni, Karhal and Etawah’s Jaswant Nagar. While Bhogaon and Mainpuri are with the BJP, the remaining Kishni, Karhal and Jaswant Nagar were in the SP kitty in the 2022 Assembly polls.
As per the caste arithmetic of Mainpuri, the parliamentary segment has around 17.4 lakh total voters of which 45% are Yadavs. The Shakya is the second dominant bloc, making up 17% of the voters. Muslims are 9% of the electorate and the rest include Brahmins, Lodhis, Kurmis and the Jatavs.
On Wednesday, SP appointed Alok Shakya, former UP minister, as the district president to lead the party in the bypolls. Analysts say that Akhilesh’s strategy is to win over the second most dominant vote bloc.