It has been a case of the most getting the least. The top five BJP winners in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections have, ironically, been left out in the government formation for reasons not known.
The biggest winner of the recent Assembly elections was Sunil Sharma, who won from the Sahibabad Assembly seat by a massive margin of over 2.14 lakh votes. He defeated Samajwadi Party's Amarpal Sharma, who garnered just over 22 per cent votes.
Sharma's name was not present in the list of ministers.
Pankaj Singh, who had won his Noida seat with a record margin of 1.81 lakh votes, was also kept out of the ministry.
Pankaj, son of Union Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, is the vice-president in state BJP and has been playing a pivotal role in organisational functioning. He has also been in-charge of Gorakhpur.
Party sources said that Pankaj was denied a ministerial position because his father is already a minister.
Another such candidate is Amit Agarwal from Meerut Cantt. Agarwal had defeated RLD's Manish Ahlawat by 1.12 lakh votes.
Purushottam Khandelwal, who won from Agra north by 1.12 lakh votes, also remained out of the council of ministers.
Senior party leader Shrikant Sharma was dropped from the council of ministers even though he defeated Pradeep Mathur of Congress by 1.09 lakh votes.
"It is clear that performance in elections was certainly not a criterion for selection of ministers. People may have voted in large numbers for a particular candidate but when the selection for ministers takes place, other factors like caste, lobbying matter more which is unfortunate. A person who has faced defeat gets back his post because of lobbying and those who strived to excel in polls are left out in the cold. It is better to focus more on lobbying than on winning elections," said one such candidate who has won for the fifth time but has been denied a ministerial position.
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