Race for Ayodhya Sadar heats up, Gosainganj rivals stir poll pot

Amid political sparring between chief minister Yogi Adityanath and Samajwadi Party national president Akhilesh Yadav over the Ayodhya Sadar assembly constituency, lobbying has begun in the Bharatiya Janata Party for this prestigious seat for the 2027 Uttar Pradesh polls. Two arch-rivals from the neighbouring Gosainganj are reportedly staking claim to the Ayodhya seat, one for himself and the other for his wife.

Sitting BJP MLA Ved Prakash Gupta, 76, who has held the seat since 2017, is likely to be replaced due to age and narrowing victory margins, party sources said.

The main ticket seekers to replace him as the BJP candidate are sitting Gosaiganj MLA Abhay Singh, who was elected on the SP ticket but cross-voted for the BJP in the 2024 Rajya Sabha polls and is now with the ruling party, and BJP's former Gosaiganj MLA Indra Pratap Tiwari alias Khabbu Tiwari for his wife Aarti Tiwari as he cannot contest the election due to his 2021 conviction in a fake marksheet case.

The Ram temple, Hanuman Garhi and most of the prominent religious symbols of Ayodhya are situated in the Ayodhya Sadar assembly constituency.

Ayodhya (Sadar) has been a BJP bastion since 1991 when Lallu Singh won it and retained it for five straight terms till 2007.

The SP broke the winning streak in 2012 when Tej Narayan Pandey alias Pawan Pandey beat Lallu Singh by 5,405 votes.

The BJP roared back in 2017 in the Modi wave as Gupta polled 1,07,014 votes (49.20%) and crushed Pandey (56,574 votes) by 50,440 votes. In the first UP assembly election after the Supreme Court's 2019 Ram Mandir verdict, Gupta retained the seat in 2022 but his margin shrank sharply.

He polled 1,13,414 votes (49.04%) against Pawan Pandey's 93,424. The margin was down to 19,990. The Bahujan Samaj Party's Ravi Prakash was a distant third with 17,706 votes. The dip, despite temple construction, set alarm bells ringing.

Then came the 2024 Lok Sabha shock as the SP's Dalit leader Awadhesh Prasad won the Faizabad parliamentary seat, which includes the Ayodhya (Sadar) assembly segment, defeating the BJP's two-time MP Lallu Singh by 54,567 votes.

While the BJP led in the Ayodhya (Sadar) assembly segment in that Lok Sabha poll, it lost four other segments- Milkipur, Dariyabad, Rudauli and Bikapur.

Now, with Yogi Adityanath projecting the Ayodhya development model and Akhilesh Yadav indicating he may personally focus on Ayodhya, the BJP wants a candidate who can combine Hindutva, caste balance and street power.

While Abhay Singh reportedly sees Ayodhya Sadar as a safer bet where the city's urban, Vaishya-Brahmin-Thakur mix plus OBC base suit his new BJP avatar, he faces intense local rivalry and anti-incumbency in Gosainganj.

"Abhay Singh has told the state leadership he does not want to contest from Gosainganj this time," a senior BJP leader said.

Indra Pratap Tiwari is pitching his RSS-BJP roots, Brahmin connect and work in Ayodhya city to seek the ticket for his spouse.

Indra Pratap's appeal is pending in the Supreme Court against the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad high court's order upholding his conviction by an Ayodhya trial court. Hence, he is seeking the ticket for his wife and looking to make a proxy comeback.

His wife had challenged Abhay Singh in the 2022 election but lost.

Former SP MLA Tej Narain Pandey has already started campaigning as Akhilesh Yadav has declared his candidature for the seat.

"I am not concerned about the BJP candidate. Whether it is chief minister Yogi Adityanath or anyone else from the BJP, I am least bothered. I have already started campaigning," Pandey said.

"The 2027 poll will be a repeat of 2012 and the victory margin will be even bigger,"Pandey asserted.

When contacted, Abhay Singh did not acknowledge that he was in contention for the party ticket.

"It does not matter who contests from the BJP in Ayodhya. The party's symbol will be victorious. But the victory margin will depend on the party's candidate. A powerful candidate will win by one lakh and an ordinary candidate will win by 25,000 votes," he said.

"My family's entire politics revolves around the Ayodhya assembly segment," said Singh who is a voter in the Ayodhya Sadar assembly segment.

Both his parents were block pramukhs in Ayodhya.

BJP chief state spokesperson Dinesh Pratap Singh said: "Unlike the Samajwadi Party where the ticket is decided by Akhilesh Yadav, in the BJP, there is a process to finalise a ticket."

"As Ayodhya is a high-profile assembly seat, there are many ticket seekers. But the ticket will be finalised by the state party leadership after following due process," he added.