LUCKNOW: Having launched the Samajwadi Party’s poll campaign for Mission 2027 from Noida as early as March 2026, SP chief Akhilesh Yadav is set to kick off his flagship PDA Yatra aboard a saffron Rath, specially curated from a bus, from the ‘Congress bastion’ of Rae Bareli on Thursday, September 24.
The fact that the SP PDA Yatra will start from Rae Bareli – the parliamentary constituency of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi – has created a lot of buzz in political circles, as it is a reminder of the SP’s strategy of choosing Amethi and Rae Bareli to start its spadework for the 2024 Lok Sabha polls as early as March 2023.
The SP chief had appointed senior party functionaries Indrajeet Saroj and Anand Bhadauria as in-charges of the Amethi and Rae Bareli parliamentary seats to constitute booth committees for the party. This was when the INDIA bloc was very much in place and the SP and Congress had, in principle, agreed to contest polls as part of the bloc.
However, the SP strategists have other reasons to offer for the choice of Rae Bareli to commence the PDA Yatra. Denying any political messaging attached to it, they feel that the party had won four of the five assembly seats in the 2022 assembly polls and presently retains three of them, with the fourth, the Unchahar SP MLA Manoj Pandey, having switched sides. Pandey joined the BJP formally during the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
In political circles, however, the move is being seen as the SP’s attempt to mount pressure on the Congress to start seat-sharing talks.
While the SP chief has been reiterating his intent to go with the alliance with the Congress party in the 2027 electoral battle, top functionaries in the UP Congress refused to comment on the move, saying there was not much need to read into the SP’s PDA Yatra in Rae Bareli. “It is election time and party heads will visit places,” he said.
