Raja Bhaiyya, five other MLAs turn down SP tickets

At least six sitting MLAs, three of them ministers in the Mulayam Singh government...

At least six sitting MLAs, three of them ministers in the Mulayam Singh government, have turned down offers for Samajwadi Party tickets and decided to go their own way in the UP Assembly elections.

Of the six, only Raghuraj Pratap Singh alias Raja Bhaiyya from Kunda has a past record of contesting elections as an Independent. The buzz is that Raja Bhaiyya wants to keep his options open and is even trying to establish contact with Mayawati’s BSP which had earlier gone after him. The others who spurned the SP offer are Rajpal Tyagi (Muradnagar), Rakesh Verma (Masauli), Surendra Kumar Munni (Ghaziabad), Dileep Verma (Mahsi) and Shyam Sunder Sharma (Mathura).

The three ministers who said no to SP are Raja Bhaiyya, Rakesh Verma and Tyagi. Rakesh Verma is the son of Beni Prasad Verma who recently to float his own Samajwadi Kranti Dal. Rakesh Verma has resigned from the government and, together with Mahsi’s Dileep Verma, will contest on tickets from Beni’s party.

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Tyagi’s case is different. He won the last Assembly elections on a Congress ticket but left for the BSP and was one of those who crossed over to SP during government formation. Since Mulayam has been handing tickets to all those who helped him out, he turned to Tyagi but the latter didn’t want the SP symbol.

“The aim is to win. Even if we want to help Mulayam, we first need to win. I had more than three meetings with my voters who all insisted that I contest independently,” Tyagi told The Indian Express.

According to him, local equations are such that he will win only if he contests minus the SP symbol.

Surendra Kumar Munni is now in the fray as a Congress candidate. “What will I do in a party where we are not taken into confidence, where party leaders do not trust us,” Munni asked.