Bharatiya Janata Party’s rebel MP Shatrughan Sinha could be the Samajwadi Party candidate from a Lok Sabha constituency in Uttar Pradesh.
Sinha was in Lucknow a week back and he held long discussions with SP chief Akhilesh Yadav.
Sources in SP said the Lok Sabha seat for Sinha was yet to be decided and talks were going on, but he would contest on SP ticket from UP.
A SP leader said the party was inclined towards fielding Sinha from one of the urban constituencies and it could be the Lucknow Lok Sabha seat. He claimed that a decision would be taken very soon.
If Shatrughan Sinha is chosen as SP candidate, he would be one of the 37 candidates to be fielded by the party in the Lok Sabha polls as alliance partner Bahujan Samaj Party will be contesting 38 seats and Rashtriya Lok Dal three as per the seat-sharing formula announced by SP, BSP leaderships. The BSP-SP alliance has decided not to field candidates in Congress bastions of Amethi and Rae Bareli.
The sources said that there were a couple of urban Lok Sabha seats in SP’s share. “With Sinha’s entry, a certain glamour quotient could work in favour of the party at these places,” the SP leader added.
The urban constituencies from where SP could field Sinha include Varanasi, Lucknow, Ghaziabad and Kanpur, held by Prime Minster Narendra Modi, Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, Minister of State for External Affairs VK Singh and senior BJP leader Murli Manohar Joshi, respectively.
Sinha as BJP candidate had won Patna Sahib seat by a margin of more than one lakh votes in 2014. He was a Union minister in-charge of Health and Family Welfare in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s government in 2002-03, and of Shipping in 2003-04.
Sinha has been sulking ever since Narendra Modi came to power as he was not included in the Union ministry and subsequently turned a rebel.