LUCKNOW: After day-long parleys to cobble up an alliance in Uttar Pradesh ahead of the Assembly elections, chief minister Akhilesh Yadav, who is also the Samajwadi Party’s (SP’s) national chief now, was reportedly not in favour of allowing the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) to be a part of an alliance he’s planning with the Congress.
Moreover, according to highly placed sources, the chief minister has reservations over some tainted names figuring in the list of 45 candidates recommended to him by his father and SP patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav on Tuesday night.
According to sources close to Akhilesh Yadav, he is not interested in giving much leverage to the RLD owing to its already shrunken vote base in western UP. The grand old party, on the other hand, is aiming to forge a grand alliance of parties opposed to the BJP as was done in Bihar. “The chief minister, in that case, wants the Congress to part with some of its seats to oblige the RLD,” said a senior SP leader.
While the SP-Congress alliance is in the final stages of being hammered out, the RLD is seeking around 40 seats which the CM is not ready to concede. SP leaders are guided by the perception that in the absence of a strong Jat leader in western UP, sparing a big chunk of seats to the RLD will hit the party prospects further in that Jat-dominated region. Moreover, it would serve no purpose if the RLD ended up losing some of the seats in the election.
In the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, RLD was swept away in the Modi wave and scored a duck in the state as communal polarisation after the 2013 riots played a major role in bringing about a shift of the traditional Jat vote to the BJP. The outfit launched by Chaudhary Charan Singh is battling for its survival with just eight MLAs in the state Assembly.
Meanwhile, the day-long discussions over seat sharing between SP and Congress leaders continued till late evening without arriving at any final figure. However, the tie-up can be announced any moment now.