Rebels play spoilsport for SP, seven cross-vote, one abstains

Even before polling for 10 Rajya Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh began with 11 candidates in the fray, no less than the Samajwadi Party chief whip in the U.P. assembly, Manoj Pandey, sent his resignation from the post and then led the SP rebels’ contingent to the Vidhan Bhavan for voting on Tuesday.

A total of seven SP MLAs cross-voted for the BJP. These MLAs are Manoj Pandey, Rakesh Pratap Singh, Rakesh Pandey, Pooja Pal, Vinod Chaturvedi, Ashutosh Maurya and Abhay Singh. The eighth rebel, Maharaji Prajapati, abstained. These eight ruined the game for the SP.

Manoj Pandey,55, had been Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav’s key man in the Vidhan Sabha and within the party. The Brahmin face of the party, he represents the Unchahar assembly constituency in the Congress bastion of Rae Bareli. He had been among the leaders involved in the party’s upper caste outreach. He was also among the party’s Brahmin leaders behind the making of the Parshuram temple in Lucknow ahead of the 2022 U.P. assembly polls. For over a year, he had been spearheading the battle against Swami Prasad Maurya over the latter’s “anti-Hinduism” utterances. This bickering led to Maurya walking out of the SP.

Manoj Pandey won three successive assembly polls from Unchahar--2012, 2017 and 2022.

Rakesh Pratap Singh, 47, is the SP MLA from Gauriganj in Amethi. A Thakur by caste, Singh won both the 2017 and 2022 U.P. assembly polls from Gauriganj for the SP. He, too, was a force within the party against Swami Prasad Maurya.

Rakesh Pandey, 71, is the SP MLA from Jalalpur (Ambedkar Nagar). There were murmurs since Sunday afternoon that he was likely to cross-vote for the BJP. On Sunday morning, his son Ritesh Pandey, the Ambedkar Nagar MP, quit his primary membership of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and in the afternoon, he joined the BJP. Rakesh Pandey was the BSP MP from Ambedkar Nagar from 2009 to 2014. He joined the SP before the 2022 U.P. assembly polls.

Pooja Pal, 44, is the SP MLA from Chail in Allahabad (Prayagraj). She is the wife of the then Allahabad West MLA Raju Pal who was gunned down in 2004. Pooja Pal won her first election from the Allahabad West assembly constituency in 2007 as the BSP candidate and retained the seat for the same party in 2012. In 2022, she moved to the SP and won the Chail seat. Pooja came into the limelight when a key witness in her husband’s murder, Umesh Pal, was gunned down in Prayagraj in February last year. Mafia- turned-politicians Atiq Ahmed and his brother Ashraf (the main accused in the Raju Pal murder case) were shot dead by three youths while they were in police custody. Since the murder of Atiq and Ashraf, there had been speculation that she would move to the BJP.

Vinod Chaturvedi, 63, is the SP’s Kalpi MLA. A Brahmin, Chaturvedi generally kept a low profile outside his constituency.

Abhay Singh, 49, is the SP MLA from Gosaiganj constituency in Ayodhya. He won the election as the SP candidate in 2012 also.

Ashutosh Maurya, 47, is the SP MLA from Bisauli, Badaun. He was the Bisauli MLA from 2012 to 2017 also as the SP member.

Maharaji Prajapati, 53, is the wife of former U.P. minister in the Akhilesh and Mulayam governments, Gayatri Prajapati, who currently is in jail, serving life imprisonment, in a case of gang rape of a minor.