- Tuesday, February 25, 2025
The Samajwadi Party is a major player in India’s most important electoral state, Uttar Pradesh.
By: Shubham Ghosh
THE general elections are not too far in India and Samajwadi Party (SP), one of the country’s major opposition parties, on Tuesday (30) declared names of 16 candidates that it will field in the polls the dates of which are yet to be unveiled.
The SP is a member of the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) — the bloc that prime minister Narendra Modi’s opposition parties formed last year. The unilateral announcement made by the SP, a major player in India’s most important electoral state Uttar Pradesh, comes days after its chief Akhilesh Yadav made a social media post on seat-sharing talks with the Indian National Congress that triggered speculation.
In his post on Saturday (27), Yadav, a former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh posted in Hindi, “Our cordial alliance with Congress is off to a good start with 11 strong seats… This trend will move forward with the winning equation. ‘India’ team and ‘PDA’ strategy will change history.”
Read: ‘2024 elections will be India’s last if Modi wins’
कांग्रेस के साथ 11 मज़बूत सीटों से हमारे सौहार्दपूर्ण गठबंधन की अच्छी शुरुआत हो रही है… ये सिलसिला जीत के समीकरण के साथ और भी आगे बढ़ेगा।
‘इंडिया’ की टीम और ‘पीडीए’ की रणनीति इतिहास बदल देगी।
— Akhilesh Yadav (@yadavakhilesh) January 27, 2024
Uttar Pradesh sends 80 members to the Lok Sabha or Lower House of the Indian parliament, making it a prized state that major political parties eye to bag. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and its National Democratic Alliance had swept the state in both the 2014 and 2019 general elections, facilitating the prime minister’s bid to win the top office two consecutive times.
Read: India’s anti-Modi alliance in tatters as key leader exits alliance
In state elections, too, the BJP has won Uttar Pradesh comprehensively in the 2017 and 2022 elections, leaving other parties such as the SP, Congress and Bahujan Samaj Party far behind.
Among the 16 candidates that the SP announced for the general elections due in April and May were Yadav’s wife Dimple, who is currently an MP from Uttar Pradesh’s Mainpuri constituency. Among other candidates fielded are state lawmakers Ravidas Mehrotra (Lucknow), Lalji Verma (Ambedkar Nagar), Awadhesh Prasad (Faizabad), Akshay Yadav (Firozabad), Dharmendra Tadav (Budaun), Devesh Shakya (Etah), Anu Tandon (Unnao), Utkarsh Verma (Kheri), Anand Bhadauria (Dhaurahra), Naval Kishore Shakya (Farrukhabad), Rajaram Pal (Akbarpur), Shivshankar Singh Patel (Banda), Ramprasad Chaudhary (Basti), and Kajal Nishad (Gorakhpur).
Ninety-three-year-old Shafiqur Rahman Barq, a five-time MP, was also fielded from the constituency of Sambhal, which he currently represents.
When the seat-sharing talks started between the two parties, the Congress reportedly wanted to contest in 30, including the 21 where it won in the 2009 general elections. But the SP was not ready to accommodate the grand-old party in more than 13 seats, informed sources said.
In the 2019 elections, the BJP won 62 seats in Uttar Pradesh while the SP and its ally Bahujan Samaj Party won only 15 (out of which SP won five). The Congress could win only one seat.
