Samajwadi Party (SP) has named 24 candidates for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections 2024. The list includes party chief Akhilesh Yadav's wife Dimple Yadav, who will contest Lok Sabha polls from her current Mainpuri constituency. The party also fielded sitting MLAs Ravidas Mehrotra and Lalji Verma from Lucknow and Ambedkar Nagar seats, respectively.
Following is the full list of SP's Lok Sabha candidates named so far:
1. Dimple Yadav: Mainpuri
2. Kajal Nishad: Gorakhpur
3. Ram Prasad Chaudhary: Basti
4. Lalji Verma: Ambedkar Nagar
5. Awadhesh Prasad: Faizabad
6. Shiv Shankar Singh Patel: Banda
7. Raja Ram Pal: Akbarpur
8. Naval Kishore Shakya: Farrukhabad
9. Annu Tandon: Unnao
10. Anand Bhadauria: Dhaurahara
11. Utkarsh Verma: Khiri
12. Dharmendra Yadav: Badaun
13. Devesh Shakya: Etah
14. Akshay Yadav: Firozabad
15. Ravidas Mehrotra: Lucknow
16. Afzal Ansari: Ghazipur
17. Rajesh Kashyap: Shahjahanpur-SC
18. Usha Verma: Hardoi-SC
19. RK Chaudhary: Mohanlalganj-SC
20. SP Singh Patel: Pratapgarh
21. Ramesh Gautam: Bahraich-SC
22. Shreya Verma: Gonda
23. Virendra Singh: Chandauli
24. Rampal Rajvanshi: Misrikh-SC
*The list will be updated as per successive announcements
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The Samajwadi Party, which is the strongest I.N.D.I.A constituent in Uttar Pradesh, had a rocky start in the alliance with the Congress. However, after multiple rounds of meetings, the two parties have finally reached an agreement on seat-sharing for the 2024 Lok Sabha election in the key states of Uttar Pradesh. As per the deal, in UP, the Congress will contest 17 seats, while the remaining 63 are in the SP’s bank.
Uttar Pradesh sends the highest number of members to Lok Sabha — 80. Hence, this will be a crucial state for the I.N.D.I.A bloc which wants to unseat the BJP.
In 2019, BJP won 62 of the 80 seats, with General VK Singh winning the Ghaziabad seat by more than 5 lakh votes over his nearest challenger, Suresh Bansal of the Samajwadi Party. In the 2014 elections, Gen VK Singh won by an even larger margin of 5,67,260 votes against the Congress's Raj Babbar, a record in the constituency created in 2008. Previously, the region was represented in the Hapur Lok Sabha seat.