In yet another setback for the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), one more of its 10 sitting MPs has left the party, this time to join the BJP. Sangeeta Azad (42), the BSP's Lalganj Lok Sabha MP, joined the ruling party along with her husband, former MLA Azad Ari Mardan and BSP spokesperson Seema Kushwaha, the lawyer of Nirbhaya and the Hathras rape victim. At a function in Delhi, they took a pledge to “strengthen the BJP” in Uttar Pradesh and to help it achieve PM Modi's target of winning over 400 Lok Sabha seats. Speculation about Azad was rife ever since she met Prime Minister Narendra Modi along with her husband in December last year. Nevertheless, the exit of Sangeeta — the fourth sitting BSP MP to leave the party in the past few months — is expected to hurt the party the most, as it would lose a face who is both a Dalit and a woman, along with her ex-MLA husband, Azad Ari Mardan, who had won the Lalganj Assembly segment on a BSP ticket in 2017. Sitting BSP MPs who have left include two Muslims, a Brahmin and a Dalit, covering all three nodes of the party's recent electoral caste-community combination. In 2019, Sangeeta had won the SC reserved Lalganj Lok Sabha seat, defeating then sitting MP Neelam Sonkar of the BJP by around 1.5 lakh votes. What's interesting is that the BJP has already declared Sonkar as its Lalganj candidate in its first list. While the Samajwadi Party (SP) might be the biggest opposition party in the state Assembly, when the SP and BSP contested the 2019 Lok Sabha polls in alliance, the BSP won 10 seats — the most after the BJP in the state — while the SP managed only five seats. Of these, sitting Ambedkar Nagar MP Ritesh Pandey, who had beaten the BJP's Mukut Bihari by around 1 lakh votes, joined the BJP last month and will contest on a BJP ticket from the same seat this time. Afzal Ansari, the BSP's sitting Ghazipur MP, who had defeated the BJP's Manoj Sinha in a close fight in 2019, joined the SP last month, which is fielding him from Ghazipur. In case of Amroha MP Danish Ali — who had defeated the BJP's Kanwar Singh Tanwar — he was suspended from the party in December after he had spoken in favour of TMC MP Mahua Moitra in the cash-for-query case, and joined Congress leader Rahul Gandhi during the latter's Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra. He recently met Sonia Gandhi in Delhi, and the Congress is likely to field him from Amroha as part of its alliance with the SP. Speaking to The Indian Express about the stream of exits from the BSP, Sangeeta said, “Eik gap ban gaya hai. Party netritva nikal nahin raha hai. Janata ko netritva chahiye (There's now a leadership void. The party leadership isn’t visible. The people need a leadership)”. Questioned further, she said, “I have no personal issues with the party or its leadership, but Behenji (party supremo Mayawati) is inaccessible, while it will take time for Akash Anand (Mayawati’s nephew and party No. 2) to connect with the people on the ground. And this gap is hurting the party.” She added, “While I am sure that it (the void) would be filled in the future, I think it will take time. We could sense this decline. So, to secure our futures and that of my constituents, I decided to join the BJP. I have been influenced by the policies of the PM, which have benefited the Dalits and deprived sections.”
