The defeat of BJP candidate Dara Singh Chauhan, a known party-hopper, in the just-concluded Ghosi byelection, points to a trend of turncoats losing elections in Uttar Pradesh after switching sides.
He also became the third Minister from the first Yogi Adityanath government (2017-2022) to lose elections after changing sides since the 2022 Assembly election. Dharam Singh Saini and Swami Prasad Maurya, who had joined the Samajwadi Party (SP) along with Mr. Chauhan before the 2022 Assembly election, too had bit the dust subsequently, signalling that voters aren’t always kind on defectors.
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Mr. Chauhan, who lost the high-voltage byelection to SP nominee Sudhakar Singh, polled 81,668 votes to Mr. Singh’s 1,24,427. The byelection, held on September 5 due to Mr. Chauhan resigning as an SP MLA, was the first contest in U.P. after the formation of the Opposition Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA). Also, the Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP) which is known to have a good base among Other Backward Class (OBC) voters, had joined hands with the BJP. Still, the byelection witnessed Mr. Chauhan, who had switched parties six times in the last three decades, falling short.
His defeat came as a surprise, since Mr. Chauhan, then contesting on an SP ticket, had trounced the BJP’s Vijay Rajbhar by over 22,000 votes in the 2022 Assembly election. The number of votes garnered by Mr. Chauhan had fallen by nearly 5,000 in the byelection.
The fortunes of Mr. Maurya, a leading non-Yadav OBC leader, saw a similar downturn. After moving to SP from BJP, he lost to the BJP candidate in Fazilnagar by a large margin of 44,000 votes. Similarly, Mr. Saini, who served as Minister of State (Ayush, Food Security) in Yogi government 1.0, lost the 2022 election by 315 votes.
In U.P., at least eight other sitting legislators lost their seats in the 2022 election, when they switched sides. The list includes six BJP MLAs who joined SP: Brajesh Kumar Prajapati who lost from Tindwari; Bhagwati Prasad Sagar from Ghatampur; Digvijay Narayan alias Jai Chaubey from Khalilabad; Madhuri Verma from Nanpara; Roshan Lal Verma from Tilhar; and Radha Krishna Sharma from Aonla.
The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) leaders agree that the defeat in Ghosi was more “due to the candidate” and “local factors” as people “didn’t like a known turncoat who had a stint in almost all major political parties”. “There was some reaction over the candidate. People didn’t like voting again within a gap of 17 months. It happens in byelections across India. In Madhya Pradesh, when 28 MLAs resigned and joined the BJP in 2020, nine of them lost the byelections,” told SBSP president Om Prakash Rajbhar to The Hindu. Mr. Rajbhar had campaigned extensively in Ghosi for the BJP.
Mr. Chauhan who started his legislative career with the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) as a parliamentarian in 1996, crossed over to the SP in 2000 and was re-elected as Rajya Sabha member. Later, when the BSP formed the government in U.P., he joined the party and won from the Ghosi Lok Sabha seat in the 2009 election. In 2014, he joined the BJP, winning the 2017 Assembly election and later switched to the SP before 2022 election. He left the SP for the BJP again within 18 months.
