KANPUR:
Strange it may sound but in the 2024 general elections, at least seven MPs from a single district, Etawah, have made it to the 18thLok Sabha. If we include two members of the Rajya Sabha as well, Etawah will perhaps emerge as the only district in the country which has sent nine of its natives to Parliament.
To start with Lok Sabha MPs first, of the 37 Parliamentarians from the Samajwadi Party, five of them belong to the party’s first family – the Yadav clan – which hails from Etawah itself.The list includes Akhilesh Yadav (elected from Kannauj), wife Dimple Yadav (from Mainpuri) and cousins Dharmendra Yadav (Azamgarh), Akshay Yadav (Firozabad) and Aditya Yadav (Badaun).
If the fact that five members of the Yadav family have made it to the Lok Sabha sounds as a surprise, here is something even more impressive – around 2015-16, as many as 20 members of the clan were in active politics. The list included five members of the family in Lok Sabha, one in Rajya Sabha and one each in the state assembly and legislative council. The count does not include the then chief minister, Akhilesh Yadav, who is now the national president of SP.
The present Lok Sabha tally also includes SP’s Etawah MP Jitendra Dohre who won the LS polls by a margin of over 58,000 votes. Dohre was originally a BSP member who switched sides in 2020. In 2018, his wife was elected as Maheva Block Pramukh on an SP ticket.
Last but not the least is Etah MP Devesh Shakya who is also from SP and is a resident of Shanti Colony of Etawah. He, too, had started his political stint with the BSP in 2002 only to side with the BJP in 2017. However, in the run-up to 2022 assembly polls, Devesh joined SP and was fielded from Etah in the recently concluded polls where he emerged victorious by around 30,000 votes.
The two Rajya Sabha MPs from Etawah include Prof Ram Gopal Yadav who is the secretary general of the Samajwadi Party and Geeta Shakya who is in RS from the BJP. She is a native of Sinhua village in Bharthana area of Etawah.
Interestingly Etawah – a reserved seat – is not only about the Yadav clan. In 1991, it witnessed the coming together of SP patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav, Bahujan Samaj Party founder Kanshi Ram. It was with Mulayam’s help that Kashi Ram contested the 1991 Lok Sabha polls and won the elections by a margin of around 1 lakh votes. The district was also an important centre of the 1857 revolt. AO Hume, the founder of the Indian National Congress, had also served as the district collector of Etawah.