BJP bets on man who ended its winning streak in Allahabad

An industrialist-turned-party- hopping politician has been fielded by BJP in Allahabad South assembly segment with the hope that the man who had ended its winning streak in the constituency a decade ago as a BSP man, might now wrest the seat from SP.

On February 23, when voters of the constituency will exercise their franchise, 43-year-old Nand Gopal Gupta Nandi shall be looking forward to avenging the defeat of 2012 at the hands of sitting Samajwadi Party MLA Haji Parvez, to whom he had lost by a slender margin of less than 400 votes.

While Nandi is the BJP candidate this time, the BSP - which expelled him three years ago - has fielded Mashooq Khan as part of a strategy to give a substantial number of tickets to those belonging to minority community.

The Congress, which Nandi had joined upon his expulsion from BSP and quit only last month, will end up supporting Parvez owing to its alliance with the Samajwadi Party.

Nandi's electoral debut in 2007 had caused the BJP to lose its grip over the assembly segment which it had never lost since 1989.

Nandi had defeated, by a margin of more than 14,000 votes, Keshri Nath Tripathi who was a five-time MLA, and had served thrice as the Uttar Pradesh assembly Speaker and was the BJP's state unit president at that time.

Emerging as the proverbial dark horse in an electoral contest that was being viewed as a "clash of titans", Nandi had humbled Tripathi and relegated Rita Bahuguna Joshi, then the Congress woman's wing president and its future state unit chief, to the position of a distant third.

Interestingly, Joshi, too, is contesting the current elections on a BJP ticket, from the Lucknow Cantt seat.

The BJP could not recover from the upset it suffered in 2007 as Tripathi finished third in the electoral contest five years later.

He has now moved out of the state on a gubernatorial assignment.