- Wednesday, March 12, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
THE Indian opposition seemed to have received yet another blow over the presidential election which was held on Monday (18) as one top leader from the northern state of Uttar Pradesh claimed that a large number of legislators of the Samajwadi Party (SP), one of the major anti-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) forces in the country, did not vote for the opposition’s candidate in the fray — Yashwant Sinha.
Brajesh Pathak, the deputy chief minister of Uttar Pradesh and a BJP leader, claimed that the SP legislators refused to back Sinha as he had once called their former president Mulayam Singh Yadav an agent of Pakistan’s spy agency Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the Press Trust of India reported.
It was only a few days ago that an old newspaper clipping in which Sinha had made allegations that Yadav was an ISI agent went viral on social media.
“I also tweeted it. The SP MLAs were upset with this and they were of the view that they will not vote for the person who defamed their leader,” Pathak told PTI after casting his vote for the presidential election.
Pathak had on Friday (15) tweeted an old newspaper clipping in which Sinha had made allegations that Yadav, the then defence minister, was an ISI agent. Sinha, a former BJP leader, served as minister in various key ministries in the times of late prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and exited the saffron party after the Modi era set in.
श्री मुलायम सिंह जी को आईएसआई एजेंट बताने वाले महानुभाव का राष्ट्रपति पद के लिए समर्थन कर श्री अखिलेश जी ने एक बार फिर अपने व समाजवादी पार्टी के संस्कारों को प्रदेश के समक्ष उदाहरण के रूप में प्रस्तुत किया है। pic.twitter.com/xcTNv3N7go
— Brajesh Pathak (@brajeshpathakup) July 15, 2022
Claiming that UP is going to make a record, Pathak said, “When prime minister Narendra Modi made Droupadi Murmu NDA’s (National Democratic Alliance) candidate, everyone wanted to support her.”
“Every MLA wants Murmu to win the poll with historic margin and make history in the country. The NDA has 273 members in the UP assembly while SP has 111 MLAs and its ally Rashtriya Lok Dal and Suheldev Bhartiya Samaj Party (SBSP) has eight and six members respectively. SBSP has already made it clear that it will be voting for NDA candidate Murmu,” Pathak said.
When asked how many of 111 SP members are voting for the NDA candidate, Pathak said, “It will not be fair to tell the numbers but one thing is sure that a large number of their MLAs did not want to vote for Sinha and favour Murmu.”
