BSP announces first UP poll list

Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati announced nominees for 100 of the 403 constituencies in Uttar Pradesh for the seven-phase assembly polls there.

It appears a third of those in the BSP first list are Muslims, around 19 per cent of voters and being wooed by the ruling Samajwadi Party (SP), too. In 2012, the community majorly supported the SP and are expected to ope for candidates bet placed to defeat the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The BSP won a majority in the 2007 UP assembly poll but won only 80 of the 403 seats in 2012. In the 2014 Lok Sabha election, it could not win even a single seat of the 80 in the state.

Mayawati recently said she'd shortlisted nominees for all 403 seats. And, that 87 tickets would go to Dalits, 97 to Muslims and 106 to Other Backward Classes (OBCs). Further, of the 113 tickets for upper castes, Brahmins will get 66, Kshatriyas 36, and Kayasthas, Vaishyas and Punjabis 11, she'd said.

Among the names fielded by the BSP are Mukesh Dixit from Saharanpur City, Majid Ali from Deoband, Diwakar Deshwal from Kairana, Satyendra Solanki from Meerut Cantt, Pankaj Jolly from Meerut City, Dharampal Singh from Etmadpur, Raj Bala from Chaprauli, Hazi Zakir Ali from Loni, Amarpal Sharma from Sahibabad, Suresh Bansal from Ghaziabad, Ravikant Mishra from Noida, Satveer Singh Gujjar from Dadri, Vedram Bhati from Jewar, Thakur Jaiveer Singh from Barauli (Aligarh) and Ramveer Upadhyaya from Sadabad (Hathras).

Both Dharampal Singh from Etmadpur and Ramveer Upadhyaya from Sadabad are party veterans. Qazim Ali Khan from Rampur is the husband of Congress leader Noor Bano.
 

Many of these seats will have polls in the first phases on February 11, for which the notification will come on January 17, with the last date of nomination on January 24.