Sant Kabir Nagar Lok Sabha Constituency: Candidates for 2019 LS poll, past results, all updates

Sant Kabir Nagar Lok Sabha constituency, one of the 80 seats in Lok Sabha, goes to polls in the sixth phase of general elections on May 12. 

The constituency, which covers parts of Sant Kabir Nagar, Ambedkar Nagar and Gorakhpur districts in Uttar Pradesh, came into existence after 2008 delimitation exercise and the first election was held in 2009. 

Sant Kabir Nagar district was carved out of Basti and Siddharth Nagar districts in 1997 and named after 15th century mystic poet Kabir. The district headquarters is Khalilabad. Two out of the five assembly segments of Sant Kabir Nagar Lok Sabha constituency were part of erstwhile Khalilabad Lok Sabha constituency. 

Bhismshankar Tiwari alias Kushal won in 2009 while the seat is currently held by BJP's Sharad Tripathi.

Tripathi was at the centre of a huge controversy after he had beaten a local BJP MLA Rakesh Singh Baghel with shoes after heated arguments at a meeting. He is the son of veteran BJP leader and former state unit president Ramapati Ram Tripathi. Without explicitly giving any reason, the BJP dropped him from the list of candidates for 2019 Lok Sabha elections and instead fielded newly-inducted leader Praveen Nishad.  Nishad had won the 2018 Lok Sabha bypoll from Gorakhpur, the constituency vacated by Yogi Adityanath after he became Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh. 

Dubbed as an experiment by Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party, which jointly fielded Nishad from Gorakhpur in the bypoll, the election results in this eastern UP constituency had given a huge shock to the BJP while it gave a boost to SP-BSP alliance. Praveen Nishad is the son of Dr Sanjay Nishad, founder of the Nishad (Nirbal Indian Shoshit Hamara Aam Dal) Party, and comes from Nishad community which has substantial population in the region.

Just before the Lok Sabha election, Sanjay Nishad met SP chief Akhilesh Yadav and announced an alliance between his party and the Mahagathbandhan which also comprises BSP and RLD. Hoowever, a day later he met UP CM Yogi Adityanath and later announced that his son was joining the BJP. He claimed that seat-sharing talks between the SP-Nishad Party broke, prompting him to take the decision. 

Soon after, Praveen Nishad was declared the BJP candidate from Sant Kabir Nagar while Bhojpuri actor Ravi Kishan has been nominated form Gorakhpur.  

This election, the BSP has fielded its 2009 winner Kushal Tiwari while the Congress has placed its bets on Bhalchandra Yadav. 

The parliamentary constituency comprises fiv Vidhan Sabha segments: Alapur (Ambedkar Nagar), Menhdawal, Khalilabad, Dhanghata and Khajani (Gorakhpur).

UP is facing a triangular 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 (Rae Bareli) and Rahul Gandhi (Amethi). 

In sixth phase of Lok Sabha polling, 14 seats in Uttar Pradesh - Sultanpur, Pratapgarh, Phulpur, Allahabad, Ambedkar Nagar, Shrawasti, Domariyaganj, Basti, Sant Kabir Nagar, Lalganj, Azamgarh, Jaunpur, Machhlishahr and Bhadohi - are going for polls.

Of these seats, 13 were won by the BJP in 2014 elections with only Azamgarh going to the Samajwadi Party patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav. 

The counting of votes of the Lok Sabha election 2019 will be conducted on May 23.