No woman in city’s poll arena which has sent many women to Parliament

Lucknow: Lucknow, which has sent eminent personalities like Vijaylakshmi Pandit, Sheorajvati Nehru and Sheila Kaul to Parliament , will go unrepresented by women candidates in the current Lok Sabha elections . All 10 candidates in fray, including incumbent MP Rajnath Singh, Ravidas Mehrotra from the Samajwadi Party and Sarvar Malik from the BSP, are men. This will be the fifth time, out of 18 elections since 1951, that no woman will be contesting from the politically significant seat of Lucknow.

As per records, similar scenarios were witnessed in 1957, 1962, 1967, and 1989 elections. Lucknow, which has around 21 lakh voters, nearly half of whom are women, has a history of electing women MPs. In fact, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, the first woman MP from Lucknow, went on to serve in various capacities, including as India’s first ambassador to the Soviet Union and later to the US.



Sheorajvati Nehru, known for her contributions as a freedom fighter and social worker, succeeded Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit as MP in 1955. Sheila Kaul, Jawaharlal Nehru’s sister-in-law, won the Lucknow seat in 1971 and served five times on a Congress ticket. Kaul was runner-up in the 1977 election.

In recent elections, Rita Bahuguna Joshi from the Congress came second in the Lucknow Lok Sabha constituency in both 2009 and 2014. Despite her strong showings, Lal Ji Tandon of the BJP won in 2009 and Rajnath Singh, also from the BJP, won in 2014. Similarly, Poonam Shatrughan Sinha from the SP also finished as a r.