Lucknow: Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Saturday released its list of candidates for the first two phases of polling, wherein the party was seen providing a majority of seats to candidates representing Scheduled Caste (SC), Other Backwards Castes (OBC) and other similar groups in the state. Among a total of 107 contestants, 44 represent the OBC community while 19 are Scheduled Caste candidates.
The recent development comes after several BJP ministers as well as MLAs, representing OBC and other communities, left the ruling party in the last few days and joined the Samajwadi Party. The move, in this context, can be seen as the ruling party's damage control attempt as well as to make inroads into the vote banks of Dalit and backward communities.
BJP also gave the Agra (rural) ticket to Baby Rani Maurya, former Uttarakhand Governor and Vice-President of BJP, who is a member of the Jatav community. The Jatavs, as per information, make up for more than half of the Dalit population in the state, and are a core voting base for Mayawati's Bahujan Samajwadi Party (BSP).
Apart from this, the party has also assigned 10 seats to women candidates. The former BJP leaders Swami Prasad Maurya, Dharam Singh Saini and Dara Singh Chauhan, who joined SP a few days back belong to OBC community.
Speaking about the issue, senior political analyst Naval Kant Singh said, "By joining the backward classes, the BJP has made it clear that it has a direct eye on the largest vote bank of Uttar Pradesh. The leaders who recently left the BJP also came from backward classes."
Notably, among the total 107 seats, 63 has been assigned to OBC and SC candidates, leaving only 44 seats for General category candidates.
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