LUCKNOW: Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) chief Jayant Chaudhary on Tuesday claimed his party’s alliance talks with Samajwadi Party were in the final stages and soon a decision in this regard would be made public.
Jayant ruled out the possibility of an alliance with the Congress which had reportedly offered him a Rajya Sabha seat in lieu of the poll understanding. Recently, Jayant happened to meet Congress general secretary and party’s UP in-charge Priyanka Gandhi at the VIP lounge of Lucknow airport. Later, both of them left for Delhi in a chartered aircraft of the Chhattisgarh government. The meeting had given wings to speculations of a possible electoral tie-up between the two parties ahead of the 2022 electoral battle.
Political pundits claimed that both the Congress and Samajwadi Party were out to woo the jat party (RLD) following traction among the jat community RLD has got recently in the wake of the ongoing farmers' unrest over three contentious farm laws in western UP.
The Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD), which was once a very influential political force in western UP, is now striving to regain its lost ground riding on the wave of farmers’ protest in which the RLD’s core Jat voters are at the epicentre. The unrest among farmers in western UP has given RLD the hope of putting on a good show in the upcoming Uttar Pradesh Assembly election.
On the other, RLD has been contesting elections in UP in alliance with the Samajwadi Party since 2014 and has failed to perform substantially in 2017 and 2019. Now, the fray in 2022 will be a do or die battle for the RLD.
In the 2017 UP Assembly polls, the SP had won 47 seats out of 298 it contested in alliance with the Congress and lost 177 seats in comparison to its 2012 figures of 224 seats. The Jayant Choudhary-led RLD won only one seat which was eight below its 2012 assembly election performance. Meanwhile, the BJP had won 130 seats from western UP.
In 2019, with the grand SP-BSP alliance in place, RLD was given just three seats – Muzaffarnagar, Baghpat and Mathura-- spared by the SP from its quota. The RLD lost all three with Chaudhury Ajit Singh losing in Muzaffarnagar and Jayant in Baghpat.
Clearing the air on his meeting with Priyanka saying it was no pressure tactic to get a bigger chunk of seats from Samajwadi Party, RLD chief Jayant said: “It was an informal meeting and it was prevalent among leaders of earlier times as well. The BJP has changed this culture, and people have become enemies of each other in politics.”
Meanwhile, Chaudhary said the RLD would fulfil all promises made in the party manifesto, including one crore jobs to youths, setting state advisory price (SAP) for sugarcane and guaranteed payments to cane growers within 14 days, if it is voted to power in the state.
However, the highly placed sources claimed that within the SP-RLD alliance, some issues over seat-sharing a lingering. While RLD wants to contest 70 seats, SP is willing to give them around 30 seats only.
Many believe that the RLD is banking on the traditional Jat and Muslim alliance which used to form late Chaudhary Charan Singh’s successful political plank. After all, it is the question of political survival for Jayant Chaudhury.