Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, the Congress general secretary and eastern Uttar Pradesh in-charge, held a massive roadshow in the city last week to campaign for Sriprakash Jaiswal.
One of the 80 Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh, Kanpur became a talk of the town after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) decided to drop its sitting MP and veteran party leader Murli Manohar Joshi. The party has fielded Satyadev Pachauri, a minister in Yogi Adityanath's Uttar Pradesh government.
Joshi had first won the seat in 2014 by defeating incumbent Sriprakash Jaiswal, a minister in Manmohan Singh government, with a margin of 2.2 lakh votes. Jaiswal has again been fielded by the Congress and is facing BJP's Pachauri and SP's Ram Kumar.
Both Pachauri (71) and Jaiswal (74) are from Kanpur and actively campaigning, and with the SP-BSP alliance candidate Ram Kumar in the fray, it is a triangular contest in this crucial constituency. Kumar is a former MLA from Unnao and is considered an outsider in the constituency.
Kanpur is one of the 11 parliamentary constituencies in UP where the SP-BSP have never been able to register a victory.
Pachauri though claims that he has an "upper hand" and the "deposits of the two rival candidates will be forfeited".
A section of residents, however, said otherwise. Locals said there will be a "keen contest" between him and Jaiswal, a three-time MP from Kanpur, who had pipped Pachauri in the 2004 general elections with a margin of 5,638 votes.
Pachauri, an MLA from Govind Nagar, said he might have lost the 2004 polls marginally but with the 2014 elections and the "Modi factor" coming into play, his "fortunes will be reversed" this time.
The micro, small and medium industries minister of Uttar Pradesh said Kanpur has about 17 lakh voters and nearly 3 lakh of them are Muslims. He claimed that there was no "polarisation of votes in this constituency".
Pachauri claimed that the Congress has "never made" national security a poll issue, which his party has done and will "immensely benefit" from it. He also claimed that there is a "bigger Modi wave" in the country this year and that the saffron party will return to power with a "thumping majority".
"The Balakot air strike demonstrated that our government at the Centre is serious about the issue of terrorism and accords importance to national security. And that is why national security and nationalism will be the overriding sentiments during the polls. This election is being fought by us now on a much larger perspective than just local issues," Pachauri told PTI in an interview.
He also said Prime Minister Narendra Modi's stature among the people of the country "ramped up" after the air strike.
However, Jaiswal has emerged the main contender in the contest in Kanpur, one of the very few seats where the Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi has campaigned.
Priyanka, the Congress general secretary and eastern Uttar Pradesh in-charge, held a massive roadshow in the city last week and attacked the Narendra Modi government and stressed that the Congress works for the people, while the BJP only favours industrialists.
Kanpur Lok Sabha constituency comprises five assembly segmets of Kanpur Nagar district: Aryanagar, Sisamau, Generalganj, Kanpur Cantt and Govindnagar.
UP is facing a three-pronged battle between the BJP, the Congress and BSP-SP-RLD alliance. Under the alliance's seat-sharing formula, the Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) is contesting on 38 Lok Sabha seats of the total 80 seats, Akhilesh Yadav's Samajwadi Party on 37 seats and the Chaudhary Ajit Singh's Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) on three seats. The alliance has left two for Congress' Sonia Gandhi (Raebareli) and Rahul Gandhi (Amethi).
The polling for 13 Lok Sabha seats in UP, including Kanpur, will be held in the fourth-phase on April 29. In 2014, the BJP won 12 of these 13 seats in the state. Only Kannauj had defied the Modi wave that year among them.
Altogether, 2,38,88,367 people are eligible to cast their vote at 27,513 booths in the 13 constituencies. A total of 152 candidates are in the fray with a maximum of 15 in Shahjahanpur. Jalaun has the minimum number of nominees at five.
The counting of votes of the Lok Sabha election 2019 will be conducted on May 23.
(With PTI inputs)
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