Samajwadi Party leader Dimple Yadav filed her nomination papers from the Mainpuri Lok Sabha seat on Tuesday. The sitting Mainpuri MP was accompanied by SP chief and her husband Akhilesh Yadav, and senior party leaders Shivpal Singh Yadav, and Ram Gopal Yadav.
Polling in Mainpuri will be held in the third round of the seven-phase Lok Sabha elections on May 7. Dimple Yadav won Mainpuri seat in the 2022 Lok Sabha bypoll after it was vacated following the death of SP patriarch and her father-in-law Mulayam Singh Yadav in October 2022. The SP leader is pitted against BJP candidate Jaiveer Singh and BSP’s Shiv Prasad Yadav.
On Monday, two other scions of the first family of the Samajwadi Party — Aditya Yadav and Akshaya Yadav — had filed their nomination papers from the Budaun and Firozabad Lok Sabha seats, respectively.
Aditya, who replaced his father Shivpal Yadav on this seat is making debut in electoral politics, filed papers in the presence of former Budaun MP Dharmendra Yadav, SP MLA Ram Khiladi Singh Yadav and Budaun ex-MP Salim Sherwani. The Buduan seat is currently held by BJP’s Sanghmitra Maurya, who defeated SP’s Dharmedra Yadav in 2019. But the BJP denied Sanghmitra ticket this time and fielded Durvijay Singh Shakya.
Akshay Yadav, former Firozabad MP and another cousin of SP chief Akhilesh Yadav, also filed his nomination from the Firozabad seat. He was accompanied by his father and SP chief national general secretary Ram Gopal Yadav.
The BJP had wrested this seat from the Samajwadi Party in 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Budaun and Firozabad will go to polls in the third phase on May 7.
Mainpuri is one of the key Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh as it is the Samajwadi Party’s bastion. Mainpuri is the stronghold of the Yadav family, and the constituency has been represented by former UP CM and Dimple’s father-in-law Mulayam Singh Yadav in the past.
In the 2022 byelection Dimple Yadav, won by 2.88 lakh votes, three times the party patriarch’s victory margin in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections when he secured the seat for the fifth time. While the bypoll to the Mainpuri parliamentary seat was necessitated by Mulayam’s death in October 2022.
Dimple made her debut in politics by contesting the bypoll to Firozabad Lok Sabha seat in October 2009, which she lost to Raj Babbar of the Congress.
She was elected to Lok Sabha for the first time in June 2012 in the bypoll to Kannauj Lok Sabha seat. She was re-elected to Lok Sabha seat in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. Dimple lost to the BJP from Kannauj in the 2019 Lok Sabha election.
Uttar Pradesh’s Tourism Minister Jaiveer Singh is the BJP’s pick from Mainpuri against Dimple Yadav. After the announcement of his name, he said Dimple had won in the bypoll riding the sympathy wave over SP patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav’s death.
Singh said the people are now asking about her work in the constituency and claimed that she has no satisfactory answer to it.
