Akhilesh Yadav’s nomination from Kannauj- the constituency from which he made his electoral debut-is no surprise. Though Tej Pratap Yadav, nephew to the former Uttar Pradesh chief minister was expected to file his nomination, on Wednesday evening, the Samajwadi Party announced the SP chief’s name through X.
The SP has a history in Kannauj- a seat which it won from 1998 to 2014. In this election, the SP has been changing candidates, sometimes thrice in at least 10 seats (and counting); Kannauj is part of that list.
Party insiders say that this is because when a candidate is announced, the party does a quick district-level survey to assess the acceptability and popularity of the candidate. Akhilesh Yadav himself told THE WEEK that the party was taking into consideration many aspects such as pressure from the local leadership and ground reality versus perception to make a final choice.
The other aspect is that the party has a limited pool of candidates to choose from 'believable' party leaders. Many desertions later, there is a scarcity of candidates who are able and willing to take on the BJP. There is the unspoken ever-present threat of the Enforcement Directorate and other investigative agencies. Even the BSP’s Akash Anand, heir apparent to Mayawati has said that his party cannot risk taking on the BJP openly.
For the SP, the challenge is not to repeat its disastrous performance of 2019, when the party won just five Lok Sabha seats. Though this was the same as the previous Lok Sabha election, the party’s vote share had fallen by more than four per cent in 2019.
To ensure that there are no further falls and that in a worst-case scenario, it can pull through seats in which equations are generally favourable, the SP is throwing in the might of its best candidates.
Besides its connections to the party, Kannauj is a deeply personal seat for Yadav. In June 2012, his wife Dimple was elected to the 15th Lok Sabha in a by-election, for the first time. She won unopposed, a nod to her father-in-law Mulayam Singh Yadav’s popularity, and the fact that Akhilesh was then a wildly popular chief minister. In 2014, she won the seat again in the Lok Sabha polls. But a shocker was in store for her in 2019, when she lost by 12,000 plus votes to the BJP candidate Subrat Pathak. It was a loss that her husband took very personally. In 2022, she was elected again to the Lok Sabha in a by-election, but from Mainpuri. This win was again a tribute to her father-in-law who occupied the seat at the time of his death.
