Rashtriya Lok Dal, on Saturday, issued its second list of its candidates for the UP assembly elections from western UP. The list showed that the party did a lot of balancing in selecting the candidates for the seats it got from Samajwadi Party under the seat-sharing formula. 

RLD is contesting the UP assembly elections in alliance with the Samajwadi Party.

In the first list, RLD had released that list of 19 candidates. The second list has the names of seven more candidates.

The RLD has fielded maximum number of Jat and Muslim candidates while giving tickets to Brahmins, Gujjar and Dalit also.

As per the second list, RLD will field Asraf Ali from Thana Bhawan, Rajpal Baliyan from Budhana, Chandan Chauhan from Meerapur, Surendra Kumar Munni from Muradnagar, Kiran Pal Singh from Shikarpur, Pramod Gaur from Barauli and Veerpal Singh Diwakar from Iglas.

RLD leaders Anil Dubey and Anupam Mishra congratulated those who were given tickets to contest the election and appealed to the party workers and leaders to work with full strength to defeat the rivals in the election.

Party insiders said the RLD hoped to get more seats under the seat-sharing formula from the SP.

“However, the race among small parties to forge an alliance with SP for the assembly election has reduced the RLD’s hope of getting more than 32 seats. The RLD leaders hope to get 38-40 seats under the seat-sharing formula,” they said.

They said RLD and SP hoped to gain mileage in the election in west UP from the farmers’ protest which continued for over one year.

“Both the SP and the RLD aim to tap the anger of farmers over the three farming laws which were later repealed by the Union government to pacify the farmers and seek their votes. Undoubtedly, the RLD is a major player in the west UP, where the party has several decades’ experience of farmers’ politics and where it existed as a prominent party before being decimated in the previous election when it won only one seat,” they added.

“There are 138 assembly seats in west UP and we have demanded 40 seats out of these. It is not a big demand,” they said.

Team RLD national convener Anupam Mishra said in the second list RLD had fielded two Jats, two Muslims, two Brahmins and a Dalit. “We are fielding Brahmins in the constituencies where Brahmin voters number 70,000 to 1.2 lakh. Besides, the Brahmins are moving towards the RLD and showing trust in RLD party supremo Jayant Chaudhary” he said.