2024 LS election: It will be Rajnath vs Ravidas in Lucknow going to polls on May 20

Voters of Lucknow and Mohanlalganj will use their suffrage in the fifth of the seven-phase Lok Sabha polls on May 20. Two-time sitting MP from Lucknow and defence minister Rajnath Singh is in a direct contest with the INDIA alliance candidate Ravidas Mehrotra, who is the Samajwadi Party MLA from Lucknow Central assembly seat.

Singh will be contesting to ensure his third consecutive victory from the prestigious parliamentary constituency which was represented by the late PM Atal Behari Vajpayee five times from 1991 to 2004.

Earlier, in 2014 general election, Rajnath Singh had defeated Rita Bahuguna Joshi who was the Congress candidate at the time. In the 2019 polls, Singh had defeated Samajwadi Party candidate Poonam Sinha, the wife of actor Shatrughan Sinha.

It was Atal Bihari Vajpayee who bagged the seat for the BJP in 1991 probably for the first time by defeating Congress candidate Ranjeet Singh. Mandhata Singh, the sitting MP of the Janata Dal, was relegated to the third position. Thereafter, the BJP never looked back. In 2009, the seat was won by the late Lalji Tandon, who was Vajpayee’s representative in Lucknow.

In the adjoining Mohanlalganj parliamentary constituency, two-time sitting BJP MP Kaushal Kishore is in direct contest with the INDIA alliance candidate RK Chaudhary, who is a Samajwadi Party leader. Riding the Modi wave, Kaushal Kishore turned Mohanlalganj into an impregnable fortress for the BJP and scored two consecutive wins in the last two Lok Sabha polls.