SP's Akhilesh Yadav & Azam Khan resigns as Lok Sabha members

|HT|

Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Akhilesh Yadav and his party colleague Azam Khan on Tuesday resigned as the Lok Sabha members from Azamgarh and Rampur days after they were elected to the Uttar Pradesh assembly. Yadav is likely to be elected as the SP legislative party leader on Saturday when a meeting of the newly-elected lawmakers will be held in Lucknow. He submitted his resignation to Lok Sabha speaker Om Birla days after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept back to power in Uttar Pradesh. SP leader and Rajya Sabha member Ramgopal Yadav accompanied him.

There was speculation earlier that Akhilesh Yadav and Khan would leave their assembly seats and retain Lok Sabha membership. Ahead of his resignation, Akhilesh Yadav met the SP’s office-bearers and supporters on March 18 in Karhal. On Monday, he consulted SP’s Azamgarh office-bearers.

Akhilesh Yadav bagged 148,000 votes to win the Karhal assembly seat by a margin of 67,504. Chief minister Yogi Adityanath won the Gorakhpur Urban seat by a margin of over 100,000 votes. SP won all the 10 assembly seats in Azamgarh. It also swept all seats in Kushambi, Ambedkar Nagar, and Ghazipur districts.

Khan, who sent his resignation through Akhilesh Yadav and Ramgopal Yadav to Birla, won the assembly election for the 10th time. He has been in jail since September 2019 as he faces 80 criminal cases. Khan’s wife, Tazeen Fatima, is a Rajya Sabha member while their son, Abdullah, was elected to the assembly this month.

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