LUCKNOW MAYOR POLL: BJP FIELDS SANYUKTA BHATIA
LUCKNOW: The state capital is set for an exciting mayoral contest with BJP deciding to back old party hand Sanyukta Bhatia for the city mayor’s post against Samajwadi Party’s Meira Vardhan and prominent lawyer Bulbul Godiyal, a BSP candidate. The Congress is yet to declare its candidate. With this, the BJP has now declared 12 of the total 16 mayoral candidates so far. The party had earlier declared 5 candidates on Saturday.
LUCKNOW: The state capital is set for an exciting mayoral contest with BJP deciding to back old party hand Sanyukta Bhatia for the city mayor’s post against Samajwadi Party’s Meera Vardhan, a reputed business woman and BSP’s Bulbul Godiyal, a Bengali-Pahadi and a prominent lawyer.
The Congress is yet to declare its candidate.
With this, the BJP has now declared 13 of the total 16 mayoral candidates so far. The party had earlier declared 5 candidates on Saturday. So far, none of the 12 mayoral candidates is a Muslim but the party has fielded about 30 minority candidates for Nagar Parishad and Zila Panchayat (semi-urban bodies).
Like the first list, the party’s second list of 8 mayoral candidates too comprised party cadre, reflecting an apparent desire to keep the workers engaged even though resentment brewed within party ranks from Lucknow to Varanasi and from Ayodhya to Mathura.
Sanyukta, wife of former party lawmaker Satish Bhatia, was vying for the party ticket along with Madhuri Halwasiya, wife of Lucknow-based businessman Sudhir Halwasiya and former bureaucrat Rekha Gupta. The BJP settled for party cadre in rest of the places with all candidates Rajiv Agarwal (Aligarh), Mridula Jaiswal (Varanasi), Mukesh Arya (Mathura), Ram Tirth Singhal (Jhansi), Vinod Agarwal (Moradabad), Asha Sharma (Ghaziabad) and Sanjeev Walia (Saharanpur) – being party hands. Vinod Agarwal has been Moradabad mayor and so was his wife.
The BJP’s second list coincided with Raju Das, priest of Ayodhya’s famous Hanuman-garhi temple who lost the mayoral nomination to a Brahmin educationist Rishikesh Upadhyaya, announcing his decision to contest the mayoral elections from the newly-formed Faizabad-Ayodhya municipal corporation on a Shiv Sena ticket.
Resentment was also palpable in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Varanasi Lok Sabha constituency where several workers, who were denied ticket for corp orators, announced anon-co-operation campaign against the BJP.
In Gorakhpur, where chief minister Yogi Adiyanath is also the head priest of Gorakhnath temple, the BJP’s decision to field trader leader Sitaram Jaiswal over and above former deputy mayor Chiranjeev Chaurasia and Dharmendra Singh, who is considered close to the chief minister, surprised many. Sources said Dharmendra could now be given some important responsibility in the civic elections.