New Delhi: Veteran actor Shatrughan Sinha’s wife Poonam joined the Samajwadi Party (SP) Tuesday and is likely to contest against BJP’s Rajnath Singh from the Lucknow constituency. Poonam, who gave up a career in acting after her marriage to Shatrughan, was inducted into the party by Akhilesh Yadav’s wife, Dimple.
The move to field her from the Lucknow constituency assumes significance as the seat has 1.3 lakh Sindhi voters and Poonam belongs to the same clan. Lucknow also has close to 4,00,000 lakh Kayastha voters and Shatrughan falls under the same segment. So the SP-BSP alliance in UP is hoping that Poonam will be able to attract a sizeable amount of votes from these two categories and that may well cause problems for the Union Home Minister.
With Shatrughan also being a Congress candidate from the Patna Sahib constituency in Bihar, sources said that the party may field a ‘soft’ candidate to facilitate Poonam’s way. But whether all these permutations and combinations will work, only time will tell.
It should however, be stated here that in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, Singh had achieved major leads in all the five Assembly segments of the Lucknow constituency.