Rahul Awana receives a ticket while SP modifies its Noida nominee

Noida The Samajwadi Party changed their Lok Sabha candidate from the Gautam Budh Nagar seat late on Wednesday night, one week before the filing of nominations.

The party unveiled a new slate of candidates and declared 38-year-old Rahul Awana as its contender for the seat.
Samajwadi Party official Mahendra Nagar was put up by the INDIA alliance on March 16 as their candidate for the constituency.

Nagar, who has been connected to the Congress for a while, served as the party’s district president from 2006 to 2016 until joining the SP in 2022.
According to party insiders, there was dissatisfaction among the ranks after Nagar’s announcement as Gautam Budh Nagar’s alliance candidate. They insisted on having a local stand for the position. In their search for a new candidate, several party officials had also met with Akhilesh Yadav, the head of the SP, in Lucknow.
Awana, a native of Asgharpur Village in Noida, told TOI that his family has always been involved in local politics. “My father and grandparents held the position of village pradhan on several occasions. I have more than ten years of experience with SP. I would address concerns with farmers, homebuyers, and pollution in the Hindon and Yamuna rivers if I am elected from Gautam Budh Nagar. “I’ll also tackle the youth unemployment problem in the district,” he said.
The spokesman for the Samajwadi Party in Noida, Raghvendra Dubey, said that he was unaware of the party’s recent candidate change. “I am not aware of the precise cause of it,” he said.
Mahesh Sharma, a two-term MP for the BJP, will compete against Awana. The BJP is aiming for a third consecutive victory after winning all five assembly seats in the 2022 state elections: Noida, Jewar, and Dadri, which are under GB Nagar, and Sikandrabad and Khurja, which are under Bulandshahr district.
Sharma received 8.3 lakh votes in the 2019 elections, more than his next competitor, Satveer Nagar of the BSP, who received 4.93 lakh votes. Arvind Kumar Singh of the Congress received only 42,000 votes, placing him third.