Lucknow: Samajwadi Party (SP) president Akhilesh Yadav will contest from Azamgarh Lok Sabha seat in Uttar Pradesh, the party announced Sunday. Incidentally, this is the same constituency from which party patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav won in 2014 defying the BJP wave which had then swept the country. This time Mulayam is contesting from the Manipuri seat is considered the ‘safest’ by the SP. An SP release also said the party will field senior leader Mohd Azam Khan from Rampur.
Akhilesh had won the 2009 Lok Sabha polls from the Kannauj constituency. He vacated the seat in 2012 when he became the Chief Minister. His wife Dimple currently is the sitting MP of the Kannauj seat. She has been nominated to contest from the same seat again.
The decision to field Akhilesh from Azamgarh is due to the fact that Mulayam won the seat by a margin of more than 63,000 votes in 2014. It has a sizeable Muslim and Yadav populations who have constantly supported the SP in the past.
Meanwhile in another twist to the tale, the SP released Sunday its list of 40 star campaigners in which there was no mention of party patron Mulayam. The list was announced by senior SP leader Ram Gopal Yadav.
It carried the names of party chief Akhilesh, Azam, Dimple and Jaya Bachchan among others, besides Ram Gopal himself.
In the 2014 polls, Mulayam contested from two constituencies, Azamgarh and Mainpuri, and won both.
PTI