LS Polls: UP's Jaunpur to witness three-cornered contest; BSP's last-minute candidate change adds twist

Jaunpur (Uttar Pradesh) [India], May 22 : The electoral battle in Jaunpur, has witnessed many twists and turns and has become a three-cornered fight between the BJP, the Samajwadi Party, and the BSP, which changed its candidate at the last minute.
Former MP Dhananjay Singh's wife Shrikala Singh nomination whose name was announced to contest the Lok Sabha elections on the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) ticket was withdrawn at the last minute and later the party nominated its incumbent MP Shyam Singh Yadav to fight the elections from Jaunpur.
The equation in the constituency was further altered after Dhananjay Singh extended his support to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) after his wife withdrew her nomination from the polls.
The BJP has fielded Kripashankar Singh and Babu Singh Kushwaha is the candidate from the Samajwadi Party (SP).
Kushwaha is from the OBC community and was previously with the BSP. He was a minister in the Mayawati cabinet.
Jaunpur is known for its lip-smacking imartis (sweets), oversized varieties of radish, and villages that produce both civil servants and labour migrants.
A two-time MLA, Dhananjay Singh had won the Jaunpur Lok Sabha seat in 2009 on a BSP ticket. But this year, a court order changed everything for him as an MP/MLA court in Jaunpur convicted him and sentenced him to seven years imprisonment for kidnapping a project manager of the Namami Gange Project in 2020.
After this, the BSP declared Shrikala Reddy Singh, the sitting zilla panchayat president, as its candidate.
However, on May 1, the Allahabad High Court granted bail to Dhananjay Singh. Singh after being released from jail said that he would now campaign for his wife Shrikala Singh, who is contesting from Jaunpur on a BSP ticket, so that she emerges victorious in the elections.
But in another twist to the tale, on May 6, the last date of filing nomination for the Jaunpur seat, the BSP changed its candidate, replacing Shrikala with the sitting MP Shyam Singh Yadav.
The Yadav candidate's registration altered the arithmetic on the seat, as it threatened to erode the SP's Yadav support base and prevent a division of Thakur votes. However, Yadav's entry into the contest came as a huge relief to the BJP candidate.
Jaunpur is considered to be a Yadav-dominated seat, and the community is the traditional vote bank of the Samajwadi Party. In 2019, Yadavs had consolidated behind the SP-BSP candidate Shyam Singh Yadav, ensuring his victory.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the Jaunpur seat went to the Bahujan Samaj Party's Shyam Singh Yadav, who contested the election under the SP-BSP alliance. Yadav won the 2019 elections by a margin of 80,936 votes. BJP's Krishna Pratap Singh was the first runner-up, followed by Congress's Deo Vrat Mishra.
In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, Krishna Pratap from the BJP won the polls with a margin of 1,46,310 votes.
Notably, Uttar Pradesh, which sends the maximum number of MPs, 80, to Parliament, is voting in all seven phases. In the sixth phase of Lok Sabha elections on May 25, voting will take place in Bhadohi, Sultanpur, Pratapgarh, Phulpur, Allahabad, Ambedkar Nagar, Shrawasti, Domariyaganj, Basti, Sant Kabir Nagar, Lalganj, Azamgarh, Jaunpur, and Machhlishahr.