BJP names new candidate for Kairana, the seat it lost last year

Kairana, Mar 23: The BJP on Saturday declared names of three more Lok Sabha candidates for Uttar Pradesh, including from Kairana where the party lost face in a crucial bypoll last year.

The party did not give the ticket to Mriganka Singh, who lost the Lok Sabha bye-elections for Kairana in May last year to a joint opposition nominee.

Instead, the Bharatiya Janata Party has nominated Pradeep Chaudhary, a two-time MLA.

"Pradeep Chaudhary is the sitting BJP MLA from Gangoh assembly constituency, which falls in Saharanpur district but comes under the Kairana parliamentary constituency," UP BJP general secretary Vijay Bahadur Pathak told PTI.

The BJP renominated Bhola Singh from Bulandshahr (SC) constituency and Yashwant Singh from Nagina (SC) seat. They currently hold the two seats.

Mriganka Singh, who has been denied a ticket, is the daughter of Hukam Singh, the BJP MP whose death led to the Kairana Lok Sabha bypoll. She was defeated by Tabassum Hasan who fought on the Rashtriya Lok Dal ticket, backed by the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party. In 2017, Mriganka Singh had lost the from the Kairana assembly constituency to an SP candidate.

The opposition projected the Kairana victory as a sign that it could take on the BJP in the general election if it fielded common candidates.

With the announcement of Saturday's list, the BJP has declared all its candidates for the first phase of the Lok Sabha elections in the state, voting for which will be held on April 11.

The candidates fielded by the BJP in the first phase are Raghav Lakhanpal (Saharanpur), Sanjeev Kumar Baliyan (Muzaffarnagar), Kunwar Bhartendra Singh (Bijnor), Rajendra Agrawal (Meerut), Satya Pal Singh (Baghpat), Vijay Kumar Singh (Ghaziabad), Mahesh Sharma (Gautam Buddh Nagar) and Pradeep Chaudhary (Kairana).

Politically important Uttar Pradesh sends 80 MPs to the Lok Sabha.

In the 2014 parliamentary elections in 2014, the BJP won 71 seats in the state, securing 42.63 per cent of the votes. Its ally Apna Dal bagged two more. The Samajwadi Party won five seats with a vote share of 22.35 per cent.

The BSP did not win any seat while securing 19.77 per cent votes. Congress registered wins on two UP seats in 2014, getting 7.53 per cent of the votes.

PTI