Samajwadi Party fields Shatrughan Sinha's wife Poonam against Rajnath Singh in Lucknow

Poonam Sinha, Shatrughan Sinha's wife, will be contesting Lok Sabha elections against Union Minister Rajnath Singh in Lucknow on Samajwadi Party's ticket, news agency IANS reported.

It is further reported that the Congress has decided not to field a candidate from Lucknow and support the candidature of Sinha from the Uttar Pradesh capital.

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Shatrughan Sinha recently resigned from the BJP and is all set to join the Congress on Saturday. He will be fielded from his current seat Patna Sahib seat, where he will be facing a direct contest with BJP's Ravi Shankar Prasad.

Associated with the BJP since the 1990s, Sinha fell out with the party's leadership in the recent past. While criticising Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP government's policies, Shatrughan continued his proximity with the RJD-led grand alliance in the state.

Rajnath Singh had won the Lucknow seat in 2014 garnering 55.7 per cent of the total 10,06,483 votes polled. He had won in all the five assembly segments of the constituency.

Rita Bahuguna Joshi, then a Congress MLA and former Uttar Pradesh Congress Committee chairperson, had remained runner-up in these elections by securing 2,88,357 of the total votes.