Samajwadi Party on Tuesday named 16 candidates for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. Party chief Akhilesh Yadav’s wife Dimple Yadav is scheduled to contest from her current Mainpuri seat. The party also fielded the sitting MLAs Lalji Verma and Ravidas Mehrotra from Ambedkar Nagar and Lucknow, respectively.
93-year-old Shafiqur Rahman Barq will be contesting from Sambhal, the constituency he currently represents in Lok Sabha. Akshay Yadav, son of senior SP leader Ramgopal Yadav, has been named as the candidate from Firozabad. Dharmendra Yadav has been fielded from Budaun parliamentary constituency.
The candidates’ list includes Utkarsh Verma from Kheri, Devesh Shakya from Etah, Anu Tandon from Unnao, Anand Bhadauria from Dhaurahra, Naval Kishore Shakya from Farrukhabad, Ramprasad Chaudhary from Basti, Rajaram Pal from Akbarpur, Shivshankar Singh Patel from Banda, Awadhesh Prasad from Faizabad, and Kajal Nishad from Gorakhpur.
Congress Given “11 Strong Seats”
The unilateral announcement by the Samajwadi Party, which is a key member of the opposition INDIA bloc Uttar Pradesh, comes days after Akhilesh Yadav’s social media post on seat-sharing discussions that had set off strong speculation in political circles.
Last Saturday, Yadav said his party’s alliance with the Congress is “off to a good start with 11 strong seats (to the Congress)”.
“This trend will move forward with the winning equation. ‘INDIA’ team and ‘PDA (backwards, Dalits, and minorities)’ strategy will change history,” he said in a post on X.
When the seat-sharing talks between the two parties began, the Congress had demanded 30 seats, including the 21 the party had won in the state in the 2009 Lok Sabha polls. The SP was, however, not willing to permit the Congress more than 13 seats, said people in the know.
Uttar Pradesh has 80 Lok Sabha seats, the highest in the country.
2019 Lok Sabha Elections Saw A Big Win For Bjp And Its Ally
Notably, in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP and its ally Apna Dal (Sonelal) won 62 out of the 80 seats in the state. The Samajwadi Party-Bahujan Samaj Party alliance, which was expected to pose a challenge to the BJP, was successful only in winning 15 seats (SP 5 and BSP 10). The Congress could bag only one seat.
Bengali