Rashtriya Lok Dal president Jayant Chaudhary Tuesday said he hoped that his party's candidate will be fielded for the Khatauli bypoll as part of an alliance with the Samajwadi Party.
Chaudhary, a Rajya Sabha MP, was here to inaugurate a volleyball competition. He was replying to queries by newspersons on the December 5 by-election to the Khatauli seat announced by the Election Commission earlier in the day.
The Khatauli bypoll was necessitated after BJP MLA Vikram Saini was last month convicted in a 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots case and handed a two-year jail term. The bypolls to the Rampur assembly seat and the Mainpuri Lok Sabha seat will also be held on December 5.
Upon his conviction, Saini was disqualified as a lawmaker. The Uttar Pradesh Assembly Secretariat notified the Khatauli seat as vacant on Monday.
Chaudhary said the RLD had contested the Khatauli seat in the elections last time as part of the SP-RLD alliance and he was hopeful that the candidate for the bypoll to the seat would be from his party. "Our preparations were going on even when people were saying that there would be no election," he said.
"People of Khatauli will now get another chance. I have full faith they will elect a positive candidate to the assembly," Jayant Chaudhary said.
Counting for Khatauli and other bypolls as well as the Gujarat and the Himachal Pradesh Assembly elections will take place on December 8.
During the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections earlier this year, Vikram Saini of the BJP had won the seat, defeating RLD's Rajpal Singh Saini by a margin of 16,345 votes.
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