Omar Rashid 
New Delhi: “Nobody saw it coming,’ says Gorakh Nath, the former Bharatiya Janata Party MLA whose petition in the Allahabad High Court became the reason why the Election Commission has decided not to hold the much-anticipated by-poll in Ayodhya’s Milkipur seat.
Nath won from Milkipur in 2017 but after losing his seat five years later filed an election petition challenging the election of the victor Awadhesh Prasad of the Samajwadi Party. On October 15, as Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar declared dates for the upcoming Assembly elections and bypolls, it was expected that he would announce the schedule for the 10 vacant seats in the crucial state of Uttar Pradesh.
However, to everyone’s surprise, including Nath’s, Kumar said that bypoll elections would be held only on nine seats. Milkipur would not go to the polls due to a pending election petition, said Kumar.
SP was ready to take on BJP in Milkipur
Since Milkipur was vacated by Prasad after he won a historic victory earlier this year from the Faizabad Lok Sabha constituency, where the Ram Temple is located, earlier this year, the result in the Assembly segment would have a bearing beyond the constituency.
Reeling under the defeat in Ayodhya this summer, the BJP hoped to restore some of its pride by wresting back Milkipur, one of the five segments in Faizabad (Ayodhya).
The SP, on the other hand, wished to retain Milkipur to deliver another blow to the saffron party’s Ram Temple card, an issue close to the ideological journey of the BJP as well as its parent organisation the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Successive defeats in Ayodhya would have pushed the BJP on the backfoot.
The Election Commission’s decision has taken everyone by surprise. The BJP had already started campaigning on the seat, with Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath personally entrusted with the responsibility of managing the electoral game in the constituency.
Adityanath visited the district at least thrice in recent months to pitch for unity of Hindu castes against the onslaught of the PDA (Pichda Dalit Alpsankhyak) slogan of Akhilesh Yadav.
The SP, on its part, had also revealed intent and declared Ajit Prasad, sitting MP Awadhesh Prasad’s son, as the official candidate in Milkipur even before the schedule was announced.
That Milkipur would be the decisive factor in the bypolls was not lost on anyone. The SP feels the election in Milkipur was deliberately stalled to prevent another upset for the BJP in Ayodhya.
“They were losing in the internal survey. And that’s why they stalled the election . They don’t want to enter the battle. They left the battlefield even before the battle. Now to save their face they are taking rounds of the court,” Yadav said recently.
‘EC decision was shocking’, says former BJP MLA who is petitioner in the case
Nath, after losing his election had in 2022 filed an election petition in the High Court claiming that the lawyer who got Prasad’s affidavit notarised had his registration cancelled many years before that. For this reason, he argued, Prasad’s election should be nullified. However, after the ECI’s decision to hold up the election in Milkipur, Nath moved an application in the High Court seeking to withdraw his petition, as it had become null following Prasad’s resignation from the Assembly in June.
“The EC decision was shocking,” Nath said, adding that he was in favour of holding elections.
Speaking to The Wire, Nath said he did not expect the ECI to withhold the polls.
“This was the first such case in the country. I had no information this would happen,” said Nath, explaining why he did not withdraw the petition earlier when Prasad had submitted his resignation.
The deferment of the Milkipur bypoll should come as a relief for the BJP. It not only allows the party to focus on the other nine seats but keeps open a window for the saffron party to redeem itself in Ayodhya in case it doesn’t do well in the nine seats that go to vote next month.
Ten Assembly seats in the 403-member house in UP are vacant. These are Milkipur in Ayodhya, Sisamau in Kanpur, Meerapur in Muzaffarnagar, Ghaziabad, Katehari in Ambedkar Nagar, Phulpur in Prayagraj, Khair in Aligarh, Karhal in Mainpuri, Majhawan in Mirzapur and Kundarki in Moradabad.
Nine of these seats, including Milkipur, were vacated after the sitting legislator contested the 2024 Lok Sabha election and won. Bypoll was necessitated in one seat, Sisamau in Kanpur, after the sitting Samajwadi Party MLA Irfan Solanki was disqualified after being convicted in a criminal case.
The BJP alliance and the SP currently hold five seats each.
‘Moral duty to withdraw writ’
Awadhesh Prasad has blamed Nath, his opponent from BJP in 2022 for stalling the Milkipur election.
“The writ became infructuous when I won the Lok Sabha election and the seat became vacant after I resigned from the seat,” said Prasad.
The Faizabad MP further said that it was Nath’s “moral duty” to withdraw the writ after he had resigned from the post of MLA.
“It was his moral duty that when I resigned and it’s been more than four months since I resigned, and the seat is vacant, to withdraw the writ,” said Prasad.
Nath said it is unlikely that the Milkipur bypoll would be held anytime soon till the matter concluded in the HC. “Ultimately it’s the loss of the people of Milkipur, who have been without an MLA,” said the BJP leader, one of the contenders for the BJP ticket.
On October 17, Justice Pankaj Bhatia of the High Court heard Nath’s application for the withdrawal of the election petition. The court directed Nath to serve a copy of the application to all the parties to the petition and to take steps for publication in the official gazette within a week.