Former Uttar Pradesh cabinet minister Dara Singh Chauhan, who recently quit the state council of ministers, joined the Samajwadi Party.
Chauhan, a sitting MLA from Madhuban Assembly seat in Mau district, joined the Samajwadi Party in the presence of party chief Akhilesh Yadav, in Lucknow.
Chauhan, who held the Forest and Environment portfolio, is the third minister of the Yogi Adityanath-led UP cabinet to quit the party this week ahead of next month’s Assembly elections in the state.
Following the induction of Chauhan into his party, Yadav said, “Backward classes and Dalits have understood that it’s BJP’s strategy to privatise everything with time, and later jeopardize BR Ambedkar’s Constitution and finish the reservation system. No one can lie more than this BJP CM (Yogi Adityanath).”
The other two ministers who resigned from the BJP and joined the Samajwadi Party are prominent OBC leader Swami Prasad Maurya and Dharam Singh Saini.
Chauhan stepped down as minister from the Yogi Adityanath cabinet on Wednesday, in a major setback to the BJP in the poll-bound state.
Besides the ministers, five BJP MLAs and Apna Dal (Sonelal) leader Amar Singh Chaudhary, who is an MLA from Shohratgarh, also joined the SP.
The other BJP MLAs who joined the Samajwadi Party are Bhagwati Sagar (Bilhaur in Kanpur), Roshanlal Verma, Vinay Shakya (Bidhuna in Auraiya), Brijesh Prajapati (Tindwari in Bahraich) and Mukesh Verma (Shikohabad in Firozabad).
On Saturday, the Samajwadi Party chief said that he would not allow more MLAs or ministers from BJP to join his party anymore.
“I would tell the BJP that I am no longer going to take BJP MLAs or ministers (into SP), you can cut their tickets,” he said, PTI reported.
