Most turncoats bite dust in UP

Lucknow, May 24: It was not a happy outing for turncoats in Uttar Pradesh this Lok Sabha polls with only Pravin Nishad and Danish Ali emerging winners after switching sides. Nishad, who had emerged victorious in Gorakhpur as the joint candidate of the SP-BSP in the by-election, switched sides and was fielded by the BJP from Sant Kabirnagar.

Nishad won Sant Kabirnagar for the BJP, defeating Bheeshma Shankar of the BSP by a margin of 35,749 votes. Another turncoat who had a successful run in the Lok Sabha elections is Kunwar Danish Ali who won the Amroha seat as a BSP candidate. Just ahead of the Lok Sabha elections, Ali a senior JD(S) leader, had joined the BSP which fielded him from Amroha.

Ali won his seat by a margin of 63,248 votes, defeating Kanwar Singh Tanwar of BJP. Luck, however, did not favour Savitri Bai Phule who resigned fron the BJP just ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections after accusing it of trying to divide society and ignoring rights of Dalits and backward castes. She joined the Congress and got ticket from the same seat but came a poor third, bagging 34,383 votes and also failing to save her deposit.

In the Congress bastion, UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi faced a challenge from her own partyman, Dinesh Pratap Singh, who joined the BJP. Though Dinesh failed to make it, he was successful in bringing the margin considerably down to 1,67,178 votes from the 3,52,713 of 2014. Shyamacharan Gupta too tried his electoral fortunes for a different party from the one through which he had managed to win the last elections.

Just a little before the elections, the sitting BJP MP from Allahabad had joined the Samajwadi Party to contest unsuccessfully from Banda behind BJP's RK Singh by a margin of 58,938 votes. Kaisar Jahan, who served as an MP from Sitapur in 2009 from the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), had joined the Congress and contested from the same seat but failed to make a mark. Likewise, Rakesh Sachan, a former MP from Fatehpur and two-time Samajwadi Party (SP) MLA also joined the Congress after being reportedly sidelined by the top SP leadership.

He contested from Fatehpur but failed. Nasemuddin Siddiqui, who was once BSP chief Mayawati's key aide in UP, also contested on Congress ticket from Bijnor but came a cropper. The sitting BJP MP from Etawah Ashok Kumar Dohre had also joined the Congress after the BJP replaced him with former Union minister Ramashankar Katheria.

Dohre contested as the Congress candidate from the same Lok Sabha seat. BJP Machhlishahr MP, Ram Charitra Nishad, joined the SP and was given ticket from Mirzapur. He, however, lost to Union minister Anupriya Patel by a margin of 2,32,008 votes.

PTI