Samajwadi Party (SP) president Akhilesh Yadav didn’t attend Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra in Amethi Monday which is another setback to the opposition INDIA alliance in Uttar Pradesh. Although Akhilesh Yadav is set to stay away from the Yatra in Raebareli too.
On Monday morning Akhilesh announced that he will join Rahul’s Yatra only after the finalisation of seat-sharing between the SP and the Congress for the UP seats for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections.
Hours later, the SamajWadi Party unilaterally announced its candidates for 11 more seats, taking the total number of its nominees that it has declared so far to 27 out of the state’s 80 seats.
Originally, the Samajwadi Party had offered 11 seats to the Congress. The Congress, however, had sought some more.
Ajay Rai, the party’s Uttar Pradesh chief, had said on an earlier occasion that it should get around two dozen seats that it had won in the 2009 general elections.
According to Samajwadi Party sources, the offer to the Congress has since been scaled up to 15 seats. They say that the Congress needs to agree to this offer for Yadav to join Gandhi’s procession at Raebareli on February 20.
Uttar Pradesh is at the front and centre of every political party’s electoral calculations before any national election.
The state, Bharat’s most populous, sends as many as 80 MPs — the highest among all states — to Parliament.
It may be recalled that the Congress had won only one seat — Raebareli — in Uttar Pradesh in the 2019 general election.
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