Outside Vanasthali Park in Ashiana locality of Lucknow's Sarojini Nagar constituency, Shivam Kanaujia, an undergraduate student, is busy serving customers at his roadside tea stall. With his father, a BJP worker, dying of Covid in April last year, it is the 22-year-old who runs the family now, taking care of his mother and sister. Kanaujia says his father devoted his entire life to the BJP, but when he died no one from the party came to offer condolences. Instead, he recalls, it was the local leaders of the Congress and the Samajwadi Party who attended his father's last rites. Yet, Kanaujia says his vote will be unbiased. “I will select the candidate on basis of their public image and the party's vision,” he says. For Kanaujia's cousin Himanshu, however, it is “any party but the BJP”. “Hamari behan jaisi dalit ladki ki body ko Hathras me aadhi raat jabaradasti jala diya. Tanashahi ravaiyya hai BJP ka (They cremated our Dalit sister forcibly in the middle of the night. This is dictatorial behaviour),” Himanshu says. As Himanshu speaks, a campaign vehicle of the SP candidate in Sarojini Nagar, Abhishek Mishra, passes by, prompting his sister Sneha to interrupt. “Hooliganism prevailed on roads during the SP governments. Today I feel safe in going to university and even walking on the road after evening. This happened because of (CM) Yogi ji. I support two BJP leaders – Modi ji and Yogi ji,” the undergraduate student of Lucknow University says, although she isn't aware who the local BJP candidate this time is. Sarojini Nagar goes to polls on February 23. The seat has 5.57 lakh voters, with Muslims as the dominant community, followed by Dalits, Brahmins, Thakurs, Yadavs and other backward castes. In the 2017 polls, the seat was won by the BJP 's Swati Singh. This time, however, she has been dropped to make way for Rajeshwar Singh, the former Enforcement Directorate (ED) joint director who entered the political arena recently after seeking voluntary retirement. With Singh contesting, local BJP leaders in the constituency are pinning their hopes on “his popularity as a police officer”. But despite his image “as a learned person who can solve people's problems swiftly”, Singh's party colleagues admit his fight is not easy. “There is a strong anti-incumbency against her (MLA Swati Singh) in rural areas, which have more than 55 gram panchayats. Swati Singh never visited rural areas. We are doing more extensive campaign there to minimize the damage,” says Ashok Nirmal, BJP’s booth president of Chandrawal. As part of their strategy, the BJP has been projecting Rajeshwar Singh as “Singham”, alluding to the movie depicting a fearless police officer. Calling him “encounter specialist”, the party has even been distributing a booklet, “Dr Rajeshwar Singh: Khaki se khaadi tak”, which details his “achievements”, particularly the raid on the residence of senior Congress leader and former Union finance minister P Chidambaram in the Aircel-Maxis deal case. However, barely eight kilometres away in Shravan Nagar, a semi-urban hamlet, BSP supporters are busy trying hard to present a different image of “ED saheb” Singh, referring to his voluntary retirement. At a gathering of BSP supporters, speakers accuse “ED saheb” of corruption. As they urge people not to choose “an outsider” over someone “who would be available for help round-the-clock”, BSP candidate Mohd Jaleesh Khan calls Sarojini Nagar his “janmboomi and karmbhoomi”. “Those who are not aware with local lanes, how they will understand problems of people here,” Khan says. At Khan's gathering, however, it is only the BJP that is in the crosshairs. That, Khan tells The Indian Express, is “because the SP is nowhere in fight here. The contest is between the BSP and the BJP only.” Perhaps why another BSP leader, Haleem Khan, wants Muslims to vote for his party en masse. “There are 57,000 Muslim voters in this vidhan sabha. all of them should support Jaleesh to defeat the ED director (Singh),” he says. In Bijnaur, however, many do not agree with Haleem. Mohd Irshad, who deals in electronic appliances, says Muslims in the area are united behind SP chief Akhilesh Yadav and Jaleesh will only “cut Muslim votes” to help the BJP. “I don’t know about the SP candidate Abhishek Mishra. But I will vote for him because I feel an SP government is the need of hour in UP,” says Mohd Shareef, another shopkeeper in the same area. Shareef also says 'ED saheb's party' has disturbed bhaichara (brotherhood) and created hatred for Muslims. “When anything unwanted happens at Pakistan border, our integrity comes under doubt here.” In Chandrawal village, Rajkumari Devi, 58, says she had voted for “kamal ka phool (lotus, BJP's party symbol)” in 2017; and in 2019, she had voted for the party because “I supported Narendra Modi”. Unsure this time, she says she will follow her husband's suggestion. “What I got in this (BJP) government is that my viklang (disability) pension was stopped 10 months back. The village pradhan too denied help. Free ration too is being provided to only one son of mine and not to another,” she says. Sarojini Nagar has never been a BJP stronghold. In 2017, it was for the first time the party won the seat as it swept the state riding high on the Modi wave. In the previous elections, since 1991, the SP had won thrice, the BSP twice and the Congress once. Despite the anti-incumbency factor against the BJP MLA, however, what makes the contest interesting this time is a prominent local SP leader Sharda Pratap Shukla, a minister in the previous Akhilesh Yadav-led government who is now contesting as Independent. After filing his nomination, Shukla joined the BJP. Also, former BSP MLA Shiv Shankar Singh “Shankari” too has joined the BJP after the SP denied him a ticket. Both Shukla and Singh have a significant following among locals in the constituency. Shankari claims that in the current elections, social equations are in BJP's favour. An SP leader says: “While Congress candidate Rudra Daman Singh, a Thakur and zila panchayat member, is popular in the rural areas, in the urban areas the fight is between SP and BJP.”
