Jaipur : Former Union minister and former Bihar governor Buta Singh will contest the Lok Sabha seat from Jalore-Sirohi as Samajwadi Party candidate. Buta had demanded a Congress ticket which the party refused following which he decided to join Mulayam Singh Yadav’s party.
He is likely to create ripples by troubling both the Congress and the BJP candidates. In 2009, Buta was denied the party ticket and he contested and lost to Devji Patel of the BJP. But Buta lost by a small margin of 50,000 votes, but also spoilt the prospects of Congress candidate Sandhya Choudhry whio finished third behind Buta in the general seat following delimitation.
The Congress had revoked the expulsion of Buta after many years in January this year. Buta, once a very trusted man of both Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi was not only brought back to the party’s fold looking at his old loyalty, but was also assigned the task to hold back-channel discussion with Tamil Nadu Chief Minister and ADMK boss J Jayalalitha and BSP supremo Mayawati. Then it was thought that he would be put up as a Congress candidate from Jalore-Sirohi seat that he won five times or would be fielded from the Ganganagar (SC) seat. But the party denied him a ticket from the two constituencies. Buta, the longstanding player who lost his home turf because of his role in Operation BlueStar was asked by the party to contest from Jalore in 1984. He along with Balram Jakhar were sent to the state to contest election because of the insurgency in Punjab.
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