With mere days left for the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections to begin, Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav on Saturday reiterated his support for the alliance forged with the Rashtriya Lok Dal. The development comes in the wake of assertions from the BJP that Yadav and RLD chief Jayant Chaudhary were were only “together till counting” of votes. More recently, Home Minister Amit Shah had reached out to Jat leaders, saying the RLD chief was in the “wrong home”.
“Their (BJP) pain has increased after RLD chief Jayant Chaudhary joined me for the UP polls. They are saying we will leave him later but I want to say that once Samajwadi people hold someone’s hand, we don’t leave them,” Yadav insisted during a poll event in Mathura yesterday. The RLD-SP alliance, he added, would win an overwhelming majority of 400 seats (out of 403) in the ensuing elections.
Towards the end of January, Shah had reached out to Jat leaders and hinted that the doors of the BJP were open for Chaudhary. “If their (SP-RLD) government is formed, then Jayant ji will leave and Azam Khan will come back. The people of UP have understood from the distribution of tickets that what is going to happen next,” he had alleged during a poll rally mere days later.
Chaudhary for his part has been vocal in his support for the alliance, repeatedly insisting that he would not join hands with the BJP. “Invite those +700 farmer families which you have destroyed, not me,” he had tweeted in Hindi in response to the BJP’s apparent advances. He also noted that he was “not a coin” and would therefore not ‘flip’.
Elections to the 403 seat Uttar Pradesh Legislative Assembly will take place in seven phases, beginning from this week. Polls will be held on February 10, 14, 20, 23, 27 and March 3 and 7, while the counting of votes will take place on March 10. In the 2017 Assembly elections, the BJP had won a landslide victory with 312 Assembly seats while the SP bagged 47 seats.
