Yashwant Sinha kin rumour may make a tough Jharkhand seat tougher for BJP

WITH 1,371 cases of rioting alone between 2019 and 2023, mostly on religious grounds, the Hazaribagh Lok Sabha seat in Jharkhand is highly polarised – a factor that is believed to have helped the BJP win the last two times here by a substantial margin.

However, as the constituency heads for voting on May 20, there is a difference. The BJP has dropped its two-time sitting MP from here, Jayant Sinha. This makes it the first election since 1998 that no family member of Yashwant Sinha, former Union Finance and External Affairs minister under the Vajpayee-led NDA government and most recently the Opposition’s joint presidential candidate, is not contesting from Hazaribagh.

On Tuesday, in a twist to the tale, the Congress announced that Jayant’s son and Yaswant Sinha’s grandson Aashir, 22, had “joined” the party. Yashwant Sinha denied this as “absolutely baseless”.

“He is not of the age where he can even contest elections. As for joining the Congress, Aashir has done nothing of the sort,” he told The Indian Express.

Nevertheless, the BJP’s Manish Jaiswal, who is a Karwal OBC leader, and the sitting MLA from the Hazaribagh Assembly seat, is expected to find the going tough against Congress candidate Jai Prakash Bhai Patel.

A leader of the Kurmi sub-community among the Mahatos, Patel is the son of JMM co-founder Tek Lal Mahato. While he was earlier with the JMM, Patel later moved to the BJP and, in the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections, joined the Congress. He resigned as the BJP MLA from Mandu Assembly segment in the Hazaribagh seat to move to the Congress.

In 2019, Jayant won from Hazaribagh with 67.4% of the votes, against the Congress’s tally of 23.06%. No one expects Jaiswal to match that performance.

The Congress is again fighting