Asim Raza, a close aide of Samajwadi Party MLA Mohammad Azam Khan was on Monday declared the SP candidate) for the Lok Sabha by-election to Rampur Seat while in Azamgarh the party decided to field former MP Dharmendra Yadav, a cousin of SP president Akhilesh Yadav.

The BJP has fielded Ghanshyam Singh Lodhi in Rampur. He is a former MLC of SP and joined the BJP in January accusing the SP of being anti-Other Backward Classes and anti-Dalit. 

Lodhi and Raza will be locked in a straight contest as both the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Congress are not contesting the seat. In fact, the Congress on Monday said it would not contest either of the two seats in the bypoll.

All the three candidates filed their nomination papers on Monday, the last date for filing papers.

Asim Raza, Rampur city SP president, was given the green signal as the party’s nominee in a meeting conducted by Azam Khan on the last day for filing nominations. The lack of clarity on the SP candidates till the last minute had built up suspense on the possible names, including that of Azam Khan’s wife Tazeen Fatma from Rampur.

In Azamgarh, the SP has banked on a trusted candidate in the form of Dharmendra Yadav, a two-time former MP from Budaun (2009 and 2014). He lost in 2019.

Azamgarh constituency is dominated by the Yadav, Muslim and Dalit communities. In the last three decades, most of the winners have been Yadavs, with a Muslim, Akbar Ahmad Dumpy, winning twice, in 1998 and 2008. Mulayam Singh Yadav has himself been an MP from Azamgarh. Akhilesh Yadav won this seat in 2019.

The by-elections in Azamgarh and Rampur were necessitated after Akhilesh Yadav and Mohammad Azam Khan resigned their Lok Sabha seats after being elected to UP assembly in the 2022 election. The SP, which faces a mammoth task of challenging the Bharatiya Janata Party in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, first has to defend these two seats.

In Azamgarh, Dharmendra Yadav will be in a triangular contest against BJP’s Dinesh Lal Yadav, popularly known as Nirahua, and Shah Alam alias Guddu Jamali of the BSP. Nirahua is a popular Bhojpuri actor who stood second against Akhilesh Yadav in the 2019 Lok Sabha election.

The BSP candidate is a former two-time MLA of the party from Mubarakpur assembly seat in Azamgarh. By fielding a strong Yadav candidate to replace its party president, the SP has attempted to negate the influence of the BSP candidate especially among the Muslim community as well as reassure the core Yadav community, whose numbers matter in the constituency.