News Analysis India

Tag: Bahujan Samaj Party

  • Lok Sabha Elections: If INDIA bloc comes to power, it will put Babri lock at Ram temple: Amit Shah in UP

    LAKHIMPUR: Hitting out at the INDIA opposition bloc, Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Wednesday said if it comes to power after the ongoing Lok Sabha polls, it will put a “Babri” lock at the Ram temple in Ayodhya. Addressing a rally in support of Union Minister of State for Home Ajay Mishra, who is the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Lok Sabha poll candidate from Lakhimpur Kheri, Shah also accused the Congress, Samajwadi Party (SP) and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) of defaming the saffron party and Prime Minister Narendra Modi by saying if he gets 400 seats in the ongoing election, reservation will be done away with.

    The senior BJP leader said though it is not going to happen, if the opposition parties come to power, they will put a “Babri naam ka tala (Babri lock)” at the Ram temple.

    He said Modi not only won the legal dispute involving the Ram Janmabhoomi, but also performed the “bhoomi puja (groundbreaking ceremony)” of the Ram temple and its “pran pratishtha” (consecration) was held in January. “After the first three phases of the Lok Sabha polls, Modiji has crossed 190 seats…. In the fourth phase, under Modiji’s leadership, we are strongly heading towards 400 seats, while the SP, BSP and Congress have been wiped out,” Shah said. AllUttar PradeshMaharashtraTamil NaduWest BengalBiharKarnatakaAndhra PradeshTelanganaKeralaMadhya PradeshRajasthanDelhiOther StatesLakhimpur Kheri will go to polls in the fourth phase of the election on May 13. The counting of votes will be taken up on June 4.

  • Uttar Pradesh: After failed BSP experiment in 2019, SP pins hope on Congress tie-up to stop BJP juggernaut in UP

    The coming general election may throw some surprising results in Uttar Pradesh with the SP-BSP alliance now replaced by the SP-Congress pact under the INDIA bloc. The Samajwadi Party-Bahujan Samaj Party alliance in 2019 had offered some resistance to the BJP on a handful of seats in the western and eastern parts of UP, but failed to make a big impact.

    With BSP supremo Mayawati deciding to duke it out alone this time, it will be up to the SP and Congress to stop the marauding juggernaut of the NDA, which has now has RLD on its side, as well as a number of caste-based regional parties in the Poorvanchal region.

    In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP and allies won 73 out of 80 Lok Sabha seats in the state. The party ceded some ground in the 2019 general election, when the opposition parties scraped their combined tally to 16.

    Even with the conventional anti-incumbency apprehensions at work, the saffron party laid its claim on the state winning 62 seats, bolstered further by two more won by its ally Apna Dal (Sonelal).

    In 2019, the maximum seats — 23 — for the BJP came from the state’s western part, where the SP-BSP alliance could manage to win only four seats each. The BSP won Saharanpur, Bijnor, Amroha and Nagina (SC seat) in the western UP, while the Samajwadi Party emerged victorious in Sambhal, Moradabad, Mainpuri (first held by Mulayam Singh Yadav then by Dimple Yadav in a bypoll) and Rampur that year. The central region of the state has prominent parliamentary constituencies of Amethi and Rae Bareli — both long considered bastions of the Congress.

    In 2019, former Congress president Sonia Gandhi retained her Rae Bareli seat, while her son Rahul Gandhi lost the long held Amethi constituency to Union minister Smriti Irani.

    Defence minister Rajnath Singh won from Lucknow.

    The BSP won only one seat from this region in Ritesh Pandey, who bagged Ambedkarnagar Lok Sabha constituency. The SP scored a zilch.

    The BJP won 13 seats from the region, which includes the coveted Faizabad Lok Sabha seat, the epicentre of a Hindu reverie that drowned parts of the nation in a collective religious fervour after the Ram Temple consecration.

    Varanasi, represented by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the Lok Sabha, is one of the 30 seats in the eastern part of the state.

    From this region, the BSP won five seats, while the SP won one, Azamgarh. Apna Dal (Sonelal) won two seats from here.

    The Bundelkhand region was swept in 2019 by the BJP, which won all four Lok Sabha seats of Jhansi, Banda, Hamirpur, and Jalaun-SC.

    The parched Bundelkhand region has been seeing the start of some irrigation projects and its residents getting safe drinking water.

    Expressways, new airports in different parts of the UP have narrowed the regional disparity the state has witnessed for a long time.