Milkipur bypoll | 10 candidates in the fray

| | Lucknow
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Milkipur bypoll | 10 candidates in the fray

Monday, 20 January 2025 | PNS | Lucknow

With the rejection of four nomination papers, 10 candidates are left in the fray for the by-election to Milkipur assembly seat in Ayodhya district. 

As many as 14 candidates had filed their nomination papers for the Milkipur assembly bypoll. The polling will be held on February 5 and counting of votes will be taken up on February 10.

Even as 10 candidates are in the fray, there is likely to be a direct contest between Bharatiya Janata Party and Samajwadi Party. Chandrabhanu Paswan is the BJP candidate while Ajit Prasad is SP candidate. Azad Samaj Party led by Chandrashekhar Ravan, MP, has also fielded its candidate.

The Milkipur bypoll is politically very significant for both the BJP and the SP. The outcome of this electoral battle could help shape the initial narrative for the 2027 Uttar Pradesh assembly elections.

The Milkipur assembly constituency reserved for Scheduled Castes, fell vacant after the 2024 Lok Sabha election, when SP MLA Awadhesh Prasad contested and won the Faizabad Lok Sabha seat of which Milkipur is an assembly segment, in Ayodhya district. 

Coming within months of the Ram temple inauguration in January 2024, that loss had dealt a bitter blow to the BJP: it was tantamount to Hindutva being humbled in its symbolic homeland. Thoughts of redemption will therefore be uppermost in the party’s mind.

BJP candidate Chandrabhan Paswan, a first-timer in electoral battle, is a member of the Pasi community. The SP has fielded Ajeet, the son of Lok Sabha MP Awadhesh Prasad. This makes the contest a direct face-off between two candidates of the same community.

With the Congress and, interestingly, even the Bahujan Samaj Party, opting out of the electoral battle, it is a bipolar contest in a seat where the Dalit votes total 27 per cent. An SP victory in Ayodhya’s politically charged landscape would signal that its expanded caste arithmetic is intact, putting it on course to challenging BJP supremacy in Uttar Pradesh and generating some early momentum for the larger battle in 2027.

Its old loyal cohort of Yadavs (15 per cent) and Muslims (8 per cent) make up a formidable near-quarter of the electorate – a fact that sealed the party’s six victories here since 1991 (the BJP has won only twice).

With both candidates being from the Pasi community (15 per cent), it is to be seen whether the voters of non-Yadav Other Backward Classes (14 per cent) extend their support to the samajwadis. Also, observers expect the BJP to press the entire weight of its formidable electoral machinery to wrest a victory in Milkipur at all cost.

Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has accorded the bypoll the utmost priority over the past six months. He has visited Ayodhya over 20 times, overseeing the BJP campaign. Addressing party workers earlier this month, he exuded confidence, citing the BJP’s November triumph in Kundarki, a constituency with over 60 per cent Muslim population and considered an SP bastion.

“If we can win Kundarki in the name of development, we can wrest Milkipur too,” he said.

BJP has projected Ayodhya as a symbol of development. Its ground level campaigns by party workers duly convey its development works and welfare schemes. To reach out to Scheduled Caste voters, the party has deployed several local Dalit leaders like Pushpendra Pasi, who has been appointed assembly seat convenor, and party district general secretaries Radhey Shyam Tyagi and Shailendra Kori.

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