The candidature of Kashyap (43), who filed his nomination with the party symbol on April 22, was cancelled on Friday during the scrutiny of papers. Kashyap, a Ghaziabad resident who claimed to have joined the SP in 2004, accused the party leadership of deceiving him by awarding the ticket to Gond, a native of Hardoi.

“Today, I came to know that the party had also given the ticket to another candidate, Jyotsna Gond, from the seat. A letter from party president Akhilesh Yadav was submitted to the returning officer stating that my name was cancelled and now Gond is their candidate. The form A & B that I submitted along with my candidature was cancelled by the party. After seeing this letter from the party, I felt cheated by the party leadership, including its president (Akhilesh Yadav),” Kashyap said.
“I will see what I will do now. I have not decided anything so far. I felt everyone cheated me,” he added.

SP’s Shahjahanpur district president Tanveer Ahmed confirmed that the party initially nominated Rajesh Kashyap, adding that it later announced Jyotsna Gond as its candidate.

Rajesh Kashyap said, “I had been preparing for the election for nearly three years at the instance of the party chief. The party had declared my candidature around two months back. On April 21, the party allotted me the symbol and I filed my papers along with form A and B the next day. I was not aware that they issued another letter on April 24, in which the party cancelled my name and declared Jyotsna Gond as its candidate. The party kept me in the dark by not informing me about the second letter. I came to know about it only during the scrutiny of papers.”

A total of 10 candidates are in the fray from the Shahjahanpur seat as of now. The last date of the withdrawal of nominations is April 29.

“A false claim is doing rounds that my nomination papers were cancelled. Since the party declared Jyotsna its nominee, I became an independent candidate. As per the rules, an independent candidate requires 10 proposers. Since I could not submit the list of proposers now, since the time for filing nomination had elapsed, my candidature was automatically rejected,” said Kashyap, who was to make debut in the Lok Sabha elections.

The Shahjahanpur seat, with around 23 lakh votes, will go to the polls on May 13. Gond, 26, who is the niece of MLC Raj Pal Kashyap, will face BJP’s Arun Kumar Sagar and BSP’s Dod Ram Verma.

In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, Sagar won the seat with 6,88,990 votes, defeating BSP’s Amar Chand Jauhar.

In Moradabad also, the SP had cancelled the candidature of sitting MP ST Hasan at the last moment and gave the ticket to Ruchi Veera. As a result, the nomination of Hasan was cancelled.