Balrampur: In Balrampur district, which sent former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to Parliament for the first time, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is facing a tough challenge from rivals to repeat its performance of winning all the four seats in the last assembly elections. For the first time in the year 1957, he reached the Parliament by winning the election from Balrampur. There are four assembly seats in Balrampur district. These include Tulsipur, Utraula, Gasdi and Balrampur. At present all these seats have BJP MLAs.
Polling will be held on March 3 under the sixth phase of the state assembly elections in Balrampur. This district, adjacent to the border of Nepal, is also related to Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. The temple of Pateshwari Devi Devipatan temple is attached to the Goraksha Peeth, whose Yogi is the superintendent. In the 2007 assembly elections, Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and BJP won two seats each in Balrampur district, while in the 2012 assembly elections all four seats went to the Samajwadi Party (SP).
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In the 2017 assembly elections, the BJP had captured all these four seats. Ansar Ahmed Khan, manager of HRA Inter College, Utraula, said, “This time the situation has changed and it does not seem that BJP will be able to win all the four seats in the district. In most of the seats there is a direct contest between BJP and SP. However, BSP and Congress candidates are also trying hard here.
Talking about the local election issues, he said that development, payment of sugarcane price and the problem of stray cattle are the main issues here. However, matters like caste and religion also have their effect here. Balrampur Sadar seat is reserved seat for SC. Here Paltu Ram, the sitting BJP MLA and minister in the state government, is facing a challenge from SP’s Jagram Paswan. Congress’s Babita Maurya is also in the fray here. The seat has more than 4.14 lakh voters, of which 38 percent belong to the Other Backward Classes, 23 percent to Muslims and 21 percent to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.
Tulsipur seat has the highest 35 percent OBC voters. Apart from this, there are 23 percent Scheduled Castes and 22 percent Muslim voters. Here Jeba Rizwan, daughter of former MP Rizwan Zaheer, has made the contest interesting by fielding as an independent candidate. Both Zaheer and Jeba are currently in jail in a murder case. Jeba is in the fray as an independent candidate after the SP refused to give him a ticket and his supporters say he is getting wide support.
In Tulsipur where BJP has once again fielded Kailash Nath Shukla. On the other hand, SP has given ticket to two-time MLA Abdul Masood Khan. Shamshad Khan, a local resident, says that if JBA is successful in making a dent in SP’s Muslim vote bank, it will benefit the BJP and OBC voters will prove to be the deciding factor here. Shailesh Kumar Singh ‘Shailu’, the sitting MLA and former student union president of Lucknow University, is facing a tough competition from SP Yadav of SP in Gasadi seat. In the year 2017, Shailu was able to defeat Yadav by a margin of 2303 votes.
Congress and BSP have fielded Muslim candidates in this seat. Utraula seat of the district has the highest 34 percent OBC voters. At the same time, 25 percent are Muslims. Here BJP has fielded sitting MLA Ram Pratap Verma alias Shashikant again. At the same time, SP has fielded Haseeb Khan and Congress has fielded Dhirendra Pratap Singh alias Dhiru.
Ejaz Malik of Subhash Nagar says that the people here have made up their mind as to whom they have to vote for this time. The Muslim voters here have united against a party that is not ready to accept them as true citizens of India. During the early years of his political career, former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee lived in Ramuapar Khurd village in Utraula tehsil of Balrampur district. He contested the Lok Sabha elections thrice from Balrampur, of which he was a Jan Sangh MP from here in 1957 and 1967, while he was defeated in the 1962 elections. (agency)