Sultanpur Sadar: UP’s bellwether seat

Vibha Sharma

Tribune News Service

Sultanpur, February 24

Booked for murdering a woman who had charged him with rape in 2013, Samajwadi Party’s sitting MLA from Sultanpur Sadar Arun Kumar Verma is currently under rough weather in this “lucky” bellwether seat of UP.

Arun Verma is crying foul, but his main rivals—BJP and BSP—are trying their best to dislodge him from the seat that “always sends to Lucknow a representative whose party forms the government in the state”.

This is the kind of folklore that surrounds Sadar—one of the five seats in the “missing-in-action” BJP MP Varun Gandhi’s LS constituency Sultanpur. CM Akhilesh Yadav launched his election campaign from here. As per BSP leader DS Mishra, it was to use the “totka”—empiricism, if it can be so defined in English—that Sadar is the one lucky seat that has always returned the candidate whose party formed the government in Lucknow.

In these elections, Mishra claims his party candidate Raj Prasad Upadhyay is in “100 per cent winning position” much ahead of his closest rivals BJP’s Sitaram Verma and beleaguered SP candidate Arun Verma.

Similar assertions are being made by BJP supporters like Deepankar Sharma. “We are winning Sadar,” he claims.

Sitaram Verma (BJP’s import from the BSP) fits the caste-based equations here perfectly, he adds. This apart, the curious coincidences surrounding the seat do make it an interesting reference point for political observers. From the Congress in 1969 to the SP in 2012, all parties elected in the state had won the Sadar seat, called Jaisinghpur before delimitation in 2009.