In UP, State With Most Lok Sabha Seats, Only 10% Of New MPs Are Women

Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh, a state with more than six crore women voters, will send just seven women MPs to parliament.

While all political parties have been championing adequate female representation in the Lok Sabha, less than 10 per cent of all candidates who fought the Lok Sabha election were women.

A total of 851 candidates in Uttar Pradesh contested the elections for 80 seats, out of which 771 were men and 80 women.

Out of the seven MPs elected to parliament, five are from the Samajwadi Party and only one from the BJP – actor-turned-politician Hema Malini. Another is Anupriya Patel, who won from Mirzapur, of the BJP’s ally Apna Dal (Soney Lal).

The five women MPs from the Samajwadi Party are Dimple Yadav, Iqra Chaudhary, Priya Saroj, Ruchi Vira, and Krishna Devi.

Priya Saroj won from Machhlishahr seat by a margin of 35,850 votes. She had been pitted against BJP MP Bholanath. Ms Saroh is the daughter of three-time MP Toofani Saroj.

Iqra Chaudhary, 29, won by 69,000 votes from Kairana; she is the daughter of  Chaudhary Munawwar Hasan, a former Rajya Sabha MP, and Begum Tabassum Hasan, a former Lok Sabha MP.

The BJP and the Rashtriya Lok Dal initially fielded six women candidates in the contest for 79 seats. One was kept for Anupriya Patel.

In Barabanki, the ticket was initially given to MP Upendra Rawat, but after a purported obscene video of the MP went viral, the party gave the ticket to Rajrani Rawat, making a total of seven women candidates from the BJP in UP, and a total of eight women candidate from the National Democratic Alliance (NDA).

The Samajwadi Party fielded 12 women candidates in the 63 seats, which the party and the Trinamool Congress contested. Of them, five have won the election. Its ally the Congress gave a ticket to only one woman, Dolly Sharma from Ghaziabad, making a total of 13 candidates from the opposition bloc INDIA.

The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) gave tickets to three women. The party did not win any seat.