– Photo : amar ujala
Expansion
When Shri Ram Mandir movement intensified in the 90s, the politics of Mandal including Ayodhya (earlier Faizabad) district came to a boil. Among these, the 1996 Lok Sabha elections were quite interesting, in which a maximum of 59 candidates contested the elections in the district to stop the saffron chariot. Despite all this, Vinay Katiyar, the fire brand leader of BJP, defeated everyone. The saffron chariot reached the Parliament at the speed of air, while the contest in other districts of the division was also interesting.
In the Lok Sabha elections held in the district till 1980, apart from the major political parties, only a few candidates used to contest the elections. Since then the number of people dreaming of becoming MPs started increasing. When elections were held in 1991 during the Shri Ram Mandir movement, BJP fielded Vinay Katiyar. To stop BJP’s victory chariot, 30 candidates including Mitrasen Yadav from CPI and Nirmal Khatri from Congress contested the elections, but Vinay Katiyar won by getting 37.74 percent votes.
read this also – Politics heated up due to Robert Vadra’s statement, he talked about contesting elections from Amethi, has campaigned on this seat
read this also – Mayawati had a deep connection with Ambedkarnagar, not only scored a hat-trick of victory, but also increased the margin.
When the next elections were held in 1996, all records were broken to stop the saffron chariot. When BJP made Vinay Katiyar its candidate, 59 more candidates including SP’s Mitrasen Yadav, BSP’s Iqbal Khan, Congress’s Yaduvansh Ram Tripathi started joining the fray. For the first and probably the last time, the public was stunned to see such a large number of candidates campaigning. Election noise was heard day and night in every street and the election became very interesting.
BJP defeated all 59 candidates. In this election, Vinay Katiyar got 2,17,038 votes and Mitrasen got 1,90,736 votes. BSP reached third position with 81,894 votes and Congress reached fourth position with 9,881 votes. Mohammad Jalil and Ramkumar Pathak, who contested independently, also collected one percent votes. Apart from this, about 50 candidates could not get even 0.5 percent votes and even their deposits were confiscated.
There was abundance of candidates in other districts also
During the Ram Mandir movement, there was a glut of candidates in other districts of the division as well. In the 1991 elections, 42 candidates contested in Amethi and 16 in Sultanpur.
– In 1996, 49 candidates contested elections in Sultanpur, 47 in Amethi, 25 in Akbarpur and 24 in Barabanki. However, in this election, BJP candidates were victorious in Faizabad and Sultanpur, SP in Barabanki, BSP in Akbarpur and Congress candidates in Amethi.
