UP Congress angry as outsiders get tickets for bypolls

Resentment against Congress candidates for three UP Assembly seats going to bypolls next month has started surfacing. For,all three,namely Saulat Ali for Moradabad...

Resentment against Congress candidates for three UP Assembly seats going to bypolls next month has started surfacing. For,all three,namely Saulat Ali for Moradabad (west),Satyanarayan Kanaujia for Malihabad and Sanjay Singh for Bidhuna,are political turncoats who joined the Congress recently.

We will request the party high command to do a re-think. In the past 10 years,I have never seen anyone by the name of Sanjay Singh here. We do not know whether he is a partyman or an outsider. It might send out a wrong message to the public, said Anil Yadav,district president of Congress in Auriya.

Yadav said Singhs name had been doing the rounds for the past few days,but we do not know how his name came up. We will place our views before senior party leaders.

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However,state Congress president Rita Bahuguna Joshi said,We respect our partymen and their feelings,but election is a different ball game altogether. This by-election is crucial for us; we cannot experiment at this point. It is not an issue of outsiders. It is an issue of performing well in these by-elections and carefully choosing candidates who have a winnability factor.

Denying that Singh was an unknown man,Joshi said he was popularly known as Raja of Ruru,which is near Bidhuna. He has been working at the grassroots level for long and has a good presence in the area. His name as well as the other two names were selected after much deliberation, she added.

As for Saulat Ali,he was first in the SP,then went to the RLD and later joined the Congress around three months back. Ali had contested 1993,1996 and 2002 Assembly elections from Moradabad rural on an SP ticket. He had won in 1996 and lost to the Congress candidate in 2002. Later,he joined Ajit Singhs Rashtriya Lok Dal and contested 2007 election again from Moradabad rural Assembly seat and lost. He joined the Congress around three months back.

Similarly,Satyanarayan Kanaujia,a businessman,who was earlier associated with the Samajwadi Party,joined the Congress just a few months back.

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The party had fielded several turncoats in the Lok Sabha elections,and look,what happened. Most of them lost, said a party leader.

On all four seats (the Congress has not announced its candidate for Morna) where the by-elections will be held on August 18,the Congress had performed badly in the 2007 Assembly elections by getting mere 1.5 to 3 per cent votes.