India News | Abbas Ansari Contested Polls on SBSP Ticket Due to Tie-up with SP: O P Rajbhar

Ballia (UP), Jul 17 (PTI) A day after the SBSP returned to the NDA fold, party chief Om Prakash Rajbhar on Monday said Abbas Ansari was a Samajwadi Party candidate and contested the assembly polls on an SBSP ticket due to a tie-up with the Akhilesh Yadav-led outfit.

However, the Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP) chief said that Abbas Ansari, son of gangster-politician Mukhtar Ansari, is "authorised legislator" of his party.

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Abbas Ansari, presently lodged in jail, had won the last assembly elections on the SBSP ticket.

"He is our party MLA. Now, see what happens..." he told reporters here.

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The Yogi Adityanath government has been running a campaign against organised crime, and Mukhtar Ansari, also in jail, and his aides are on the police list. His several properties have been attached and illegal structures bulldozed.

Rajbhar's SBSP had contested the 2022 assembly elections in alliance with the SP and has six MLAs, including Abbas Ansari.

On the issue of a caste-based survey, Rajbhar praised Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and said that his party was in favour of such a survey.

"Dr Ambedkar had made arrangement in the Constitution for a caste census every 10 years. Without caste census, we cannot provide budget accordingly," he said.

"We are in favour of the caste census and will not backtrack from our stand," he said.

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)