By IANS
Lucknow : Samajwadi Party nominee Neeraj Shekhar Singh, son of former prime minister Chandra Shekhar, was Wednesday elected to the Lok Sabha from his late father’s constituency Ballia in Uttar Pradesh, defeating the ruling Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) of Mayawati.
The defeat dealt a first blow to Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati seven months after riding on to power in the state on her own.
BSP candidate Vinay Shankar Tiwari who bagged 164,450 votes trailed far behind Singh who polled 295,735 votes – a victory margin of over 131,000 votes in the polls that witnessed long drawn and hectic electioneering over the past one month.
Mayawati and her predecessor Mulyam Singh Yadav had addressed election rallies in the constituency. Several BSP ministers camped in Ballia in a desperate bid to snatch the seat from Chandra Shekhar’s family.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress finished way behind. BJP’s former MP Virendra Singh Mast polled 22,723 votes. Rajiv Upadhyay (Congress) got 10,755 votes. Both the candidates lost their respective deposits.
Chandra Shekhar (Samajwadi Janata Party) had won the Ballia seat in 2004 with the backing of the Samajwadi Party by a margin of nearly 91,000 votes. The BSP had then polled some 189,000 votes. Chandrashekhar had been retaining the seat since 1977 except in 1984, when he lost to the Congress.
Both the BSP, which took power on its own in Uttar Pradesh last year, and the Samajwadi Party had made the Ballia election a prestige issue.
“This is the beginning of the end of the Mayawati government,” a beaming Mulayam told reporters shortly after the announcement of the results here
Mayawati however blamed it all on “the dominant feudal element” in the area. In a press release issued here, she said: “The feudal element in Ballia did not allow ordinary voters to exercise their franchise.”
“This is not a victory of the Samajwadi Party but a personal win of Neeraj Shekhar, who got sympathy votes because of his father’s demise.”