The Samajwadi Party (SP) on Tuesday announced its initial list of 16 candidates for the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections scheduled in the next few months.
Dimple Yadav, current SP Member of Parliament from Uttar Pradesh's Mainpuri and wife of former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav, is set to run again from Mainpuri, a stronghold of the Yadav family previously represented by Dimple's father-in-law, former UP CM Mulayam Singh Yadav.
With this, Samajwadi Party becomes the first party to reveal its candidates for the upcoming Lok Sabha polls. Akshay Yadav, the son of senior SP leader Ramgopal Yadav, will be contesting from Firozabad, and Dharmendra Yadav is the candidate for the Budaun parliamentary constituency.
Other names on the list include Devesh Shakya for Etah, Utkarsh Verma for Kheri, Anand Bhadauria for Dhaurahra, Anu Tandon for Unnao, Naval Kishore Shakya for Farrukhabad, Rajaram Pal for Akbarpur, Shivshankar Singh Patel for Banda, Awadhesh Prasad for Faizabad, Ramprasad Chaudhary for Basti, and Kajal Nishad for Gorakhpur.
This announcement by the Samajwadi Party, a key member of the opposition INDIA bloc in Uttar Pradesh, comes shortly after SP chief Akhilesh Yadav's recent social media post on seat-sharing discussions.
On 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’ strategy will change history,” he said in a post on X.
