Mr Yadav also said, “If you fight confusion, you will not win any election”.
Shahjahanpur:
Samajwadi Party leader Akhilesh Yadav was outraged at the Congress for failing to reach a seat-sharing agreement in the Madhya Pradesh Assembly elections. Samajwadi Party leader Akhilesh Yadav on Friday once again lambasted the INDIA bloc ally, saying, “If Congress behaves like this, who will support them?” .
“I am not giving any advice or suggestions to the Congress party, but there is a big challenge ahead of the nation. The BJP is a big party. It is a very organized party. There should therefore be no confusion on the part of any party about this. If you fight confusion, you will not win any election,” the SP chairman told reporters here.
He added, “If Congress behaves like this, who will support them?”
On Thursday, Akhilesh Yadav had expressed dissatisfaction over the Congress not allocating a single seat to his party despite seat-sharing talks in Madhya Pradesh and suggested that the Congress could get the same treatment from his party in Uttar Pradesh.
The SP chief had said his party leaders would not have answered Congress’ calls for a rally in Madhya Pradesh had he known that the INDIA alliance was limited to the national level. “I must have gotten confused,” he had told reporters.
Ajay Rai, president of the Uttar Pradesh Congress Committee, shot back on Friday that Mr Yadav cannot blame the Congress as the SP has released its list of candidates to his party and has favored the BJP by contesting separately.
The SP chairman, however, reiterated that the INDIA alliance should have made it clear that there would be no draw in the state elections.
He said, “PDA (Backward, Dalit and Alpsankhyak) was formed before INDIA. On several occasions I have said that there is an INDIA alliance but our strategy is PDA and PDA will defeat NDA.”
“When a leader of Madhya Pradesh and a former chief minister spoke to us and asked about the seats we wanted in Madhya Pradesh, I shared the SP’s performance in various elections in Madhya Pradesh and told him that there are many people from Madhya Pradesh were elected who joined other parties.
“I recalled that when the Congress needed support, the SP MLA was the first to provide support and a government was formed,” he said.
“We are against the BJP and we have offered our support to defeat the BJP. During the meeting that lasted until 1 a.m., they assured us that we would give up six seats. But when they declared candidates for all seats, the SP was forced to choose candidates where we are strong,” he said.
The (SP) announced its third list of two candidates on Thursday evening. With this, it has announced 33 candidates for the November 17 elections to the 230-member assembly in the BJP-ruled state. The Congress has announced its candidates for 229 seats.
According to insiders of both parties, the Congress had agreed to vacate six seats for the SP in Madhya Pradesh, but the seat-sharing arrangement did not materialize.
“I feel that if you were not willing to give up a seat, you should not have talked to us. But they have not given us any information. So the SP is fighting where we are present,” Mr Yadav said.
“Due to the emotions that Samajwadis have at Azamgarh, it is possible that the Congress may have the same emotions at Raebareli and Amethi. We have never commented on Raebareli and Amethi,” the SP chief said without elaborating.
In the 2018 Madhya Pradesh elections, the SP won one seat (Bijawar in the Bundelkhand region) and finished second out of five, securing 1.30 percent of the vote in alliance with the tribal Gondwana Gantantra Party.
The INDIA grouping came into existence primarily to put up a united front against the Bharatiya Janata Party in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
Meanwhile, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan hit out at the INDIA bloc after voters fielded candidates against each other in parliamentary elections. He said the opposition group is driven by the motto of ‘friendship in Delhi and struggle in states’.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
