Mulayam niece loses election on BJP ticket
LUCKNOW: The Akhilesh Yadavled Samajwadi Party (SP) on Tuesday celebrated the poll defeat of a Yadav family member. The occasion was an SP candidate’s victory over SP chief patron Mulayam Singh Yadav’s niece Sandhya Yadav in the zila panchayat poll in Mainpuri.
Sandhya Yadav, who is the sister of former Badaun SP MP Dharmendra Yadav and was the zila panchayat president in Mainpuri, had defected to BJP in 2017 along with her husband. This time she contested the zila panchayat member’s post from Mainpuri on a BJP ticket. But SP candidate Pramod Kumar (not a family member) defeated her by 1907 votes. Poll authorities in Mainpuri confirmed her defeat. Since 1991, the SP never lost the seat and maintained the winning streak this time as well. While Pramod Kumar bagged 7905 votes, Sandhya got 5998.
Samajwadi Party had already disowned her when she filed her nomination papers as the BJP candidate and said: “She is a Yadav family member, but since 2017 is not an SP member”. She contested ward number 18 from Mainpuri. And of the two zila panchayat seats in Saifai, SP patron Mulayam Singh Yadav’s ancestral village, the SP and Pragatisheel Samajwadi PartyLohia (PSP-L) won a seat each.
PSP-L candidate Arvind Yadav won the seat by a wide margin of 11,000 votes against SP’s Arvind Yadav. The win boosted the morale of PSP-L. However, the SP candidate and Mulayam’s nephew Abhishek Yadav alias Anshul Yadav won the Saifai 2 seat by defeating the BJP candidate Avanish Yadav by 16,254 votes. Abhishek, who was the sitting zila panchayat member from the same seat is the son of Mulayam’s youngest brother Rajpal Yadav. This seat too had been in the family for long. Before Abhishek Yadav, his mother Premlata Yadav held the seat twice. Abhishek now has won it three times in a row.