Akhilesh’s Alliance Experience Fails Again
Lucknow, March 10: Samajwadi Party’s (SP) Akhilesh Yadav’s experiment of forging an alliance during elections has failed once again. This is the third time in a row when SP’s strategy to contest elections in alliance has boomeranged.
In 2017 Vidhan Sabha polls SP, which was in power at that time, forged an alliance with Congress and gave 92 seats to its alliance partner and contested on 311 seats. The alliance didn’t work neither for the SP nor for the Congress. SP which had won 224 seats in 2012 polls was reduced to 47 and Congress managed to win only 7 seats.
In 2019 SP forged a ‘mahagathbandhan’ with his arch rival Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) hoping to counter Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which had won 73 seats with its allies in 2014. Akhilesh took the step despite the disapproval of his father and SP patron Mulayam Singh Yadav, who even publicly criticised and had said that SP should have gone in the poll arena on its own.
Akhilesh was expecting that BSP core voters will get transferred to SP, but it did not happen. While SP managed to win only 5 seats, BSP which did not win even a single seat in 2014 Lok Sabha elections gained 10 seats. This time Akhilesh along with RLD forged an alliance with the number of smaller parties, including Om Prakash Rajbhar led Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP) and Mahan Dal, keeping in view the caste equations. But except RLD and SBSP all other alliance partners failed to perform as expected. In fact, the performance of some alliance partners not at par with the independents at some places.
