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The BJP has registered a bumper victory in the by-elections to two Lok Sabha seats of Uttar Pradesh. The party has defeated him in the bastion of the Samajwadi Party. While Azam Khan’s absence in Rampur is being said to be one of the main reasons for the defeat, in Azamgarh too, Samajwadi Party leaders did not get off the ground. However, the case of Azamgarh seat is very interesting among them, because apart from the ground cadre of the BJP, Dinesh Lal Yadav himself was ‘Nirhua’, the main reason for the party’s victory. The same Nirhua, who was defeated by SP chief Akhilesh Yadav in the last Lok Sabha elections by a huge margin.
In such a situation, a question is, how did the BJP once again trust Nirhua, who lost in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections? What role did CM Yogi Adityanath play in getting him a ticket? How did Nirhua’s popularity dominate this party’s victory? Apart from this, how did the BJP’s caste strategy fit with Nirhua standing on this seat?
Nirhua was defeated in 2019, then how did he get the ticket?
Dinesh Lal Yadav Nirhua contested against Akhilesh Yadav of SP in 2019 on BJP ticket. Akhilesh, however, secured a unilateral victory and nearly double the votes polled from Nirahua. After this victory, the morale of the BJP was definitely broken, but Nirhua had no contact with this area at all. In the assembly elections held in the same year, Nirhua was vigorously engaged in campaigning for the party. While his songs continued to play in Azamgarh, on many occasions he himself was seen campaigning in the area. Despite his hard work, the BJP was defeated in all the five seats in the region, but the party cadre had guessed his popularity after seeing his hard work and the crowd gathered in his roadshow.
Did the closeness of Yogi Adityanath work for Nirhua?
His close proximity to Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath is also being cited as a reason behind Nirhua getting the ticket from Azamgarh seat for the second time. Since the 2019 elections, the BJP is continuously using Nirhua in the election campaign in eastern UP. Nirhua himself had released videos in support of making Yogi CM just before the assembly elections this year. In this, Nirhua called for making Adityanath the CM not only in 2022 but also in 2027. After the announcement of Nirahua’s name in Azamgarh Lok Sabha seat, Yogi arrived last week to attend his campaign program. While Nirhua continued to raise the issue of Yogi’s victory in the assembly elections in the elections, Yogi Adityanath, playing the Hindutva card, even gave indications of changing the name of Azamgarh to Aryamgarh.
How did Nirahua’s popularity dominate?
While Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav himself contested in front of Nirhua in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, this time Akhilesh’s brother Dharmendra Yadav took the front on behalf of SP. However, where Akhilesh Yadav himself was a big face among Yadav voters, Dharmendra Yadav is yet to be identified as a winning leader of SP. Dharmendra Yadav had won from the party’s strongholds Saifai and Badaun in the 2004, 2009 and 2014 elections. But in 2019, he was defeated in Badaun seat by Swami Prasad Maurya’s daughter Sanghamitra Maurya. That is, Dharmendra had already lost the party’s stronghold in front of a big face.
On the other hand, Nirhua started campaigning for Azamgarh by-election even before his name was announced. His popularity can be gauged from the fact that after Nirhua started campaigning, the BJP deferred the idea of giving any Brahmin face a chance on the seat. Earlier, there was talk of getting ticket to Akhilesh Mishra ‘Guddu’ on the seat. However, photographs of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and BJP National President JP Nadda were also installed in the poster tweeted by Nirhua. The poster appealed to the people of Azamgarh to press the lotus button. Seeing the reaction that came to his tweet, the party decided to give ticket to Nirhua.
How did the caste equation fit with Nirhua’s standing?
If we look at the caste equations of Azamgarh, then this seat has the maximum number of four lakh Yadav voters. There are three lakh Muslims and 2.75 lakh Dalit voters. In 2019, when Nirhua was contested against Akhilesh Yadav, both Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) were fighting together. It is said that the main reason for Akhilesh’s bumper victory in this seat was the convergence of Muslim and Dalit votes. However, this time the picture was completely different due to the BSP fighting separately in the elections. This time BSP gave ticket to Shah Alam alias Guddu Jamali to align Muslim votes with Dalit votes. That is, the Muslim votes fixed for Dharmendra Yadav have already been cut by the BSP. On the other hand, the popularity of Nirhua and his being a Yadav also proved to be a problem for Dharmendra. The scattering of Yadav votes made this election easy for Nirhua, while Dharmendra Yadav was defeated despite giving a tough fight.
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