Tej Pratap Singh Yadav to campaign for SP in Bihar polls

Patna, Sep 22: RJD supremo Lalu Prasad's son in-law Tej Pratap Singh Yadav will campaign for Samajwadi Party (SP) in the Bihar Assembly elections, a SP leader said on Tuesday.

Yadav, the SP MP from Mainpuri Lok Sabha seat in Uttar Pradesh, will come to Bihar during Assembly polls and campaign for his party's candidates, Bihar unit SP president Ramchandra Singh Yadav told reporters.

"Politics and familial relations are separate things... Tej Pratap Singh Yadav is a SP leader first and a relative or son in-law of anybody later," he said.

It may be mentioned that Yadav, a third generation politician from the SP patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav's family, was married to RJD supremo Lalu Prasad's youngest daughter Raj Laxmi at a high-profile function in Delhi earlier this year.

However, the bonhomie between the RJD supremo and the SP chief did not last for long as the latter dumped the 'Grand Alliance' in Bihar earlier this month in protest against the number of seats alloted to the SP.

The SP went on to form a third front with the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), Nationalist People's Party (NPP) of former Lok Sabha Speaker P A Sangma, Pappu Yadav's Jan Adhikar Party, Samajwadi Janata Party (SJP) of former Union minister Devendra Singh Yadav and Samras Samaj Party of another former Union minister Nagmani.

As per the seat-sharing arrangement among the third front constituents finalised two days ago, SP bagged 85 out of the total 243 Assembly seats in Bihar.

Pappu Yadav's Jan Adhikar Party was alloted 64 seats followed by the NCP (40), Samras Samaj Party (28), SJP (23) and NPP (3).

The Bihar unit SP chief Ramchandra Singh Yadav also released his party's first list of 19 candidates in which his wife Nitu Chandra Yadav would contest from the Bhabhua seat.

The other SP candidates are Amarjeet Kumar Singh (Sultanganj), Kalpana Devi (Banka), Vijay Kumar Yadav (Sheikhpura), Moti Rajbanshi (Rajauli-SC), Neetu Kumari (Hisua), Abdul Baqui (Jamui), Dilip Keshari (Begusarai), Ramanuj Prasad Singh (Suryagraha), Ramashish Kumar (Lakhisarai), Pappu Yadav (Jamalpur), Ganesh Paswan (Dhoriya-SC), Diwakar Chandra Dube (Nathnagar), Shobhakant Mandal (Kahalgaon), Ramashraya Sahni (Sarairanjan), Shatrughan Kumar Paswan (Rosra -SC), Gopal Bharti (Bhagalpur), Md Shamsher Alam (Teghra) and Alok Kumar Singh (Chainpur).

PTI