Samajwadi Party announces Kafeel Khan as MLC candidate

The Samajwadi Party announced on Thursday that it is fielding Kafeel Khan, who has had a run-in with the Yogi Adityanath government, from Deoria in the MLC elections scheduled in UP next month. Candidates for 36 seats of the legislative council will be elected next month.

The BJP occupies 35 seats in the 100-seat council, while the SP's tally is 17 seats. Khan, a paediatrician at the government-run BRD Medical College in Gorakhpur, was first suspended and then sacked last year by the UP government after 63 children died in a paediatric ward in 2017, allegedly due to oxygen shortage.

Though departmental enquiries had absolved him of medical negligence, the government terminated his services after a "reassessment" of the enquiry report.