BSP loses fourth sitting MP, Sangeeta Azad says: ‘Leadership not visible’

In yet another setback for the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), one more of its 10 sitting MPs has left the party, this time to join the BJP.

Sangeeta Azad (42), the BSP’s Lalganj Lok Sabha MP, joined the ruling party along with her husband, former MLA Azad Ari Mardan and BSP spokesperson Seema Kushwaha, the lawyer of Nirbhaya and the Hathras rape victim.

At a function in Delhi, they took a pledge to “strengthen the BJP” in Uttar Pradesh and to help it achieve PM Modi’s target of winning over 400 Lok Sabha seats.

Speculation about Azad was rife ever since she met Prime Minister Narendra Modi along with her husband in December last year.

Nevertheless, the exit of Sangeeta — the fourth sitting BSP MP to leave the party in the past few months — is expected to hurt the party the most, as it would lose a face who is both a Dalit and a woman, along with her ex-MLA husband, Azad Ari Mardan, who had won the Lalganj Assembly segment on a BSP ticket in 2017.

Sitting BSP MPs who have left include two Muslims, a Brahmin and a Dalit, covering all three nodes of the party’s recent electoral caste-community combination.

In 2019, Sangeeta had won the SC reserved Lalganj Lok Sabha seat, defeating then sitting MP Neelam Sonkar of the BJP by around 1.5 lakh votes. What’s interesting is that the BJP has already declared Sonkar as its Lalganj candidate in its first list.

While the Samajwadi Party (SP) might be the biggest opposition party in the state Assembly, when the SP and BSP contested the 2019 Lok Sabha polls in alliance, the BSP won 10 seats — the most after the BJP in the state — while the SP managed only five seats.

Of these, sitting Ambedkar Nagar MP Ritesh Pandey, who had beaten the BJP’s Mukut Bihari by around 1 lakh votes, joined the BJP last