BSP MP Ritesh Pandey resigns from party, joins BJP
Pandey said he has come to the conclusion that the party does not need his service as he has not been called for meetings for a long time.
LUCKNOW: BSP, marred with a series of desertions by its sitting MPs just ahead of upcoming Lok Sabha elections, got a jolt when Ritesh Pandey, the sitting MP joined the BJP in the presence of UP Deputy CM Brajesh Pathak, BJP UP chief Bhupendra Chaudhury and party’s in-charge Baijayant Panda in New Delhi on Sunday.
However, reacting to the development, BSP chief Mayawati advised all her party MPs to do introspection if they had followed the party norms. Ritesh Pandey had won the Ambedkar Nagar Lok Sabha seat as the BSP candidate by defeating BJP’s Mukut Bihari by nearly a lakh votes in the 2019 elections when SP and BSP had contested in alliance. This time, however, the BSP has decided to go solo in the upcoming elections.
While resigning from the BSP’s primary membership, Pandey said that the party did not need him as the leadership had neither been calling him for any meetings for a long time, nor spoken to him. “I made numerous efforts to get in touch with and meet you (Mayawati) and the top leadership of the party but it did not yield any result,” Pandey said in his resignation letter. Shortly, after that, Ritesh Pandey joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the national capital.
As per the buzz around Pandey’s decision to switch over to the BJP, he would be given a ticket from his traditional Ambedkar Nagar seat by the BJP to take on SP candidate and sitting MLA Lalji Verma. Ritesh Pandey’s father Rakesh Pandey is a sitting SP MLA from the Jalalpur assembly segment. Rakesh Pandey has also been with the BSP and represented Ambedkar Nagar as the BSP MP from 2007-14 as a BSP MP. He left BSP to join the SP in January 2022, just ahead of UP Assembly elections.
Ritesh Pandey, who pursued his entire higher education abroad, commenced his political career in 2012 by contesting the Jalalpur Assembly seat but losing it to the SP. He was then given a ticket from the same seat in 2017 and won it by defeating the BJP candidate. In 2019, Ritesh was given ticket as SP-BSP alliance candidate from Ambedkar Nagar Lok Sabha seat and won it for the alliance which fell apart immediately after the general elections.
Comments are closed.