LUCKNOW: Speculations about emerging tensions in the Samajwadi Party-Congress alliance ahead of the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections are gaining weight after SP chief Akhilesh Yadav’s decision to skip the INDIA bloc meeting in Delhi scheduled for Wednesday, September 30.
The strains in the tie-up are being attributed to a stalemate over seat-sharing talks between the two allies for the 2027 UP Assembly elections, due early next year.
While the SP chief cited pre-scheduled election commitments, his absence is being widely seen as a response to Congress’s “deliberate” delay in engaging in seat negotiations.
However, highly informed sources claim that Akhilesh does not have any “unavoidable” engagement, with only routine pre-election events lined up on Wednesday as per his itinerary for the specific date. As for claims that he was busy with the nominations for the Rajya Sabha polls, the notification for the elections was to be issued on September 29, while the last date for filing nominations was October 6.
Political experts, however, view Akhilesh’s stance of skipping the INDIA bloc meeting convened by the Congress as the SP’s tit-for-tat response to the Congress brass, which has been maintaining a conscious silence on seat-sharing talks with the SP. At the same time, Congress’s state functionaries continue to blame the SP for delaying deliberations over seats.
Despite Akhilesh Yadav’s reiteration that the SP will contest the 2027 polls in alliance with the Congress, Rahul Gandhi or Congress national president Mallikarjun Kharge have yet to announce it formally.
Moreover, the situation has become trickier as leaders of both the Congress and the SP have been launching attacks against each other. While UP Congress leaders, including the party’s Saharanpur MP Imran Masood and UPCC chief Ajay Rai, have claimed that the SP is more in need of an alliance with the Congress, SP MP Iqra Hasan has been making similar claims about the Congress.
Moreover, both Imran Masood and SP MP Iqra Hasan, pitching their respective leaders Rahul Gandhi and Akhilesh Yadav as the main opposition face in UP, have added to the strain.
In such a situation, if Akhilesh takes part in the September 30 INDIA bloc meeting and is seen with Kharge and Rahul, media attention was likely to shift to the SP-Congress tussle over seat-sharing for the UP polls, leaving Akhilesh in a precarious situation, especially when he had repeatedly confirmed that the alliance was in place.
Recently, Akhilesh Yadav started his PDA Yatra from Rae Bareli, the parliamentary constituency of Rahul Gandhi, which led to some strong reactions from the UPCC.
Congress party state president Ajay Rai said that during election time, people visit different districts and that Congress leaders may visit SP strongholds of Etawah, Kannauj and Mainpuri in the coming days.
Thereafter, responding to a media query on Rai’s comment, SP national general secretary Shivpal Yadav said Congress was welcome to visit Mainpuri and Etawah but would not get votes.
Shivpal is a six-time MLA from the Jaswant Nagar Assembly segment of the Mainpuri parliamentary constituency, of which Dimple Yadav is the sitting MP.
However, Akhilesh tried to downplay the two incidents, describing them as “tricks of the trade” that he had learnt from the BJP. “Often the BJP appears to be at loggerheads with some political banners but inside they work together, we (SP and Congress) are doing the same,” he said.
