The Samajwadi Party has suffered a significant blow as former SP leader Shalini Yadav, who ran for the Varanasi Lok Sabha seat against Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2019, joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Monday in presence of BJP president Bhupendra Singh Chaudhary and deputy CM Keshav Prasad Maurya.
Shalini Yadav, who joined the Samajwadi Party in 2019, is the daughter-in-law of the late Shyamlal Yadav, former Congress MP from Varanasi and deputy chairman of Rajya Sabha. In 2017, she unsuccessfully contested the Mayoral poll of Varanasi Municipal Corporation from the Congress. She is an alumna of Benaras Hindu University.
During her first parliamentary election in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, Shalini contested for the Varanasi seat against PM Modi but was defeated by a significant margin of over 4.75 lakh votes.
