New Delhi: In a space of two months, the electoral battle in Jaunpur, a tightly-locked constituency in Eastern Uttar Pradesh, has witnessed many twists and turns. At the centre of the drama has been former MP and Thakur strongman Dhananjay Singh. His conviction in March in a 2020 case followed by his wife’s sudden entry into the Lok Sabha election, her subsequent withdrawal from the contest and his extension of support to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), have altered equations in the constituency. This was one of the 16 seats the opposition managed to win in the northern state in 2019.
Here is how the current political game of caste, betrayal and dubious events unfolded in Jaunpur, which is known for its lip-smacking imartis (sweets), oversized varieties of radish, and villages that produce both civil servants and labour migrants.
In the last eight elections, the constituency has been won only by either Yadav or Thakur candidates. In 2019, when the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) contested together, Shyam Singh Yadav (BSP symbol) was elected MP. With the BSP contesting alone and tilted heavily towards the incumbent, the SP surprised everyone after it fielded a non-Yadav candidate from the Kushwaha OBC caste, former BSP minister Babu Singh Kushwaha in Jaunpur.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
Kushwaha had been on the margins of politics ever since he walked out of jail in 2016 in connection with an alleged scam in the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM). However, he still enjoys tremendous clout among his community. Given that the SP has a strong core vote base of Yadavs and Muslims in Jaunpur, Kushwaha’s entry threatened to turn sour the BJP candidate Kripa Shankar Singh’s return to his native Jaunpur after enjoying a long political career in Maharashtra, where he even served as a minister in the Congress government.
With Kushwaha likely to attract votes from the Maurya-Kushwaha community in addition to Yadavs and Muslims, the SP thought it had developed a winning formula.
The situation for Kripa Shankar Singh turned even more dismal after the BSP, the third wheel in the contest, declared Shrikala Reddy Singh, the sitting zilla panchayat president, as its candidate. Originally from a prominent business and political family from Telangana, Shrikala is the wife of Dhananjay Singh, a former two-time MLA who was elected as MP in 2009 as a BSP candidate. Although Dhananjay Singh has not won any election since 2009, he still enjoys popularity in parts of Jaunpur, especially among his Thakur community, enough to disturb the arithmetic on the seat.
In 2014, when Dhananjay contested as an independent, he secured over 64,000 votes and finished in fourth spot ahead of the Congress. In 2012, he fielded his then wife Jagriti Singh as an independent from Malhani in the assembly seat. Jagriti, his second wife, would later be accused of murdering her maid in Delhi. The two divorced in 2017 and Dhananjay married for the third time. Jagriti lost the election but stood second. Dhananjay was then an MP. In 2017, he contested from Malhani and finished second on the ticket of the NISHAD Party, getting more votes than the BSP and BJP. In 2020, Dhananjay once again contested from Malhani in a by-poll, standing a close second, pushing the BJP and the BSP to the third and fourth spots, respectively. In the 2022 assembly election, Dhananjay once again stood runner-up, this time on the ticket of the JD(U).
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He was gearing up to contest the 2024 Lok Sabha election as an independent when a court order changed everything for him. On March 6, 2024, four days after the BJP declared Kripa Shankar its candidate, an MP/MLA court in Jaunpur convicted him and sentenced him to seven years imprisonment for kidnapping, extorting and threatening a project manager of the Namami Gange Project in 2020. While being taken to prison, amid a sea of supporters and heavy police presence, Dhananjay told media persons that he was being jailed as part of a “conspiracy” to prevent him from contesting the election. With Dhananjay’s conviction ruling him out of the election, his wife Shrikala, who was elected as the zilla panchayat president in 2021 on her husband’s influence, got active campaigning for the Lok Sabha. And on April 16, the BSP named her as its official candidate, turning the election into a three-way contest. The development also fascinated observers, as a woman of South Indian-origin was contesting from a seat in the Bhojpuri belt.
On April 16, hours after Shrikala was declared candidate, Mohammad Anees, a former gunner of Dhananjay, was murdered by three people. Police said it was over a personal dispute and rivalry but added that all angles would be probed.
Shrikala said they had lost “a solid associate” and vowed to ensure strict action against the culprits. A month earlier, Jaunpur had sprung into news after Pramod Yadav, a BJP leader who, according to some accounts, was considered close to Dhananjay, was murdered.
In her campaign, Shrikala tried to play up a victimhood card of a “conspiracy” against Dhananjay. “How many will you conspire against? Now, everyone is a Dhananjay,” read one of her publicity material targetted at the BJP.
The underlying message was that the BJP had convicted her husband to ensure he did not contest.
Shrikala’s election prospects, already solidified by the promise of attracting the core voters of the BSP, Jatav Dalits, she received a boost when the Allahabad high court on April 27, though refusing to stay Dhananjay’s conviction, granted him bail. After his release from jail on May 1, Dhananjay had declared that he could now “campaign” for his wife. “My good wishes to her that she contests and wins the election,” he told media outside Bareilly prison. But in another twist to the tale, on May 6, the last date of filing nomination for the Jaunpur seat, the BSP changed its candidate, replacing Shrikala with the sitting MP Shyam Singh Yadav.
Shrikala had already filed her nomination.
The Yadav candidate’s entry changed the arithmetic on the seat as it threatened to eat into the Yadav vote base of the SP and prevent a division of the Thakur votes. This came as a big relief for the BJP candidate.
Whether Dhananjay backed out or the BSP dumped him under BJP pressure, is still unclear. Both sides have accused each other of betrayal. BSP’s Varanasi division coordinator Ghanshyam Chandra Kharwar said Shrikala refused to contest and backed out due to “some pressure” faced by her husband. “The BSP did not cut her ticket. She refused to contest,” said Kharwar, stressing that the BSP had even inaugurated her election office.
Dhananjay, however, termed this as false and claimed that the BSP replaced his wife to undermine him. There was no “pressure” on him, Singh said, stressing that his wife was “hurt” by the sudden decision.
Political sources in Jaunpur said that the decision to not contest may not have been so sudden as prior to the BSP officially replacing its candidate, there was a buzz that Shrikala had discussed with her core supporters the possibility of the BSP getting in talks with alternate candidates. SP sources, however, believe that Shrikala used this theory as a decoy to mislead her own supporters into projecting the BSP as the villain and evade the election.
On May 7, Shrikala posted a long message on social media expressing regret over being dropped as a candidate but did not explain how it happened. “Jaunpur is my family, that’s why I’m willing to pay any price for the honour and future of this family,” she said. “I’m ready to sacrifice everything for your interest.”
However, the suspense over which way Dhananjay would swing continued even after that. And on May 11, Dhananjay posted a cryptic message on social media hinting at his next move. “Whatever is destined by Ram will happen.”
Three days later, Dhananjay convened a meeting of his supporters where he declared support to the BJP candidate in Jaunpur. He said he took the call on the feedback received from his supporters who were overwhelmingly in favour of backing the BJP.
“Pradesh mein ek achi sarkar chal rahi hain (There is a good government functioning in the state),” Dhananjay announced from the stage at the Ajhurai Inter college in Sikrara. He asked his supporters to vote for a “stable government” under Narendra Modi.
Why the Thakur strongman, who still has ten pending criminal cases, including those with charges of murder and attempt to murder, actually backed out is still not precisely known. Local Hindi media speculated that it could be the result of the pressure he and his wife anticipated from the Enforcement Directorate (ED) probe into a complaint over money laundering charges. A Jaunpur resident had lodged a complaint with the ED and the Lokayukta accusing Shrikala of purchasing a prime property in Lucknow at an unreasonably low rate from Gayatri Prajapati, the former SP minister who is facing a probe by the ED into illegal mining and money laundering. The ED has already seized several of Prajapati ‘s properties across states worth crores of rupees. Prajapati is in jail and in the recent Rajya Sabha election in Uttar Pradesh, his wife Maharaji Prajapati, an SP MLA, secured an advantage for the BJP after she abstained from voting, playing her part in helping the BJP win an additional seat.
But none of of the alleged charges against Shrikala and her husband are on record from the ED. We cannot confirm the reports independently. In her election affidavit, Shrikala declared she has no criminal cases against her. Her husband has a long criminal history.
Dhananjay faced a total of 46 FIRs, of which 36 have been disposed off. In 26 cases, court records show, he was acquitted. Charges were dropped against him in one case. In five others, closure reports have been submitted while three cases have been withdrawn by the state government. His only conviction was in the 2020 case for which he was in jail.
Dhananjay is facing trial in seven cases. Two cases are pending at the investigation stage and in one related to Section 5(2) of the Official Secret Act, proceedings have been stayed by the high court.
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While rejecting his appeal for a stay on his conviction, Justice Sanjay Kumar Singh took note of the state government’s submission that in all the cases Dhananjay was acquitted, the acquittals were secured on the account of the fact that the prosecution witnesses turned hostile.
“When persons having long criminal history turn into elected representatives and become law maker, they pose a serious threat to the functioning of a democratic system,” the court said.
While talking to media at an event organised by him on May 14, Dhananjay dismissed all questions about him being under pressure to toe the BJP line. He said that even when the BJP was supposedly putting him under pressure, he decided to contest the 2020 bypoll against it.
He justified his decision to back the BJP by harping about the ideological conformity between his supporters and the BJP, and argued that it was no time to remain “neutral.” He also recalled his meetings in the past with Modi, Amit Shah and Rajnath Singh.
Dhananjay then spoke about his own links to the BJP, saying that his father had a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) background while he was personally connected to the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) during his student politics days. His wife Shrikala, who had joined the BJP in Telangana some years back, also has a relative — her cousin Konda Vishveshwar Reddy — who is contesting the 2024 Lok Sabha election as a BJP candidate in Chevella constituency of Telangana.
Even as Dhananjay has vowed to not share any dias with the BJP in this election, Shrikala met union minister Amit Shah on May 15, a day before Modi was to address a rally in Jaunpur. She described it a “courtesy call”. In his speech, Modi decided to evade the local dynamics at work in Jaunpur.
Shrikala Reddy Singh’s meeting with home minister Amit Shah. Photo: X/@ShrikalaSingh
SP leaders feel that Dhananjay’s support to the BJP may not have a large-scale impact. His shift might only consolidate his “staunch” Thakur voters in favour of the BJP but other communities are unlikely to get influenced by him, said Raghvendra Yadav, national general secretary of the SP’s frontal organisation Lohia Vahini.
“Had he himself contested, he could made a difference and been in the fight,” Yadav said, adding that in Malhani assembly segment the Thakur leader can attract 60,000-70,000 votes in his name even if he stands as an independent.
With the BSP fielding a Yadav candidate, questions are also being raised on the potency of the SP’s arithmetic. But Yadav, who is campaigning in Jaunpur, said he was surprised to find that many BSP voters were shifting to the SP on the question of saving Constitution and reservations, while Yadavs would fully back the SP-Congress candidate Kushwaha.
“The SP will face no damages because of Dhananjay Singh. The BJP and BSP have been exposed. People know they are contesting together. The BSP voter has also understood this and they will back the SP because they want to save the Constitution and ensure employment for their youth,” said Yadav.
The BJP has won Jaunpur four times since 1989, while the SP won in 1998 and 2004. The BSP has won it twice; first with Dhananjay in 2009 and as Shyam Singh Yadav in 2019 as the joint candidate of the SP-BSP.
