Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Akhilesh Yadav on Thursday said the Opposition’s Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) bloc was only at the national level.
Yadav’s reaction comes days after he asked the Congress to clarify whether the tie-up was also at the state level.
“Now we have the information that the alliance is only at the [national] level of Delhi. Fine, we will talk about Delhi when the time comes. Now that we have accepted that the alliance does not apply to state elections, we went ahead and began declaring candidates for those [Madhya Pradesh] elections,” he reportedly said.
The five states including Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Telangana, Chhattisgarh, and Mizoram are slated to go to the polls next month.
This will be the last major electoral exercise ahead of the 2024 elections.
He said had he known that there would be no INDIA alliance at the state level, SP representatives would not have gone to Congress with a list for seat sharing.
Yadav, who attended an SP event related to the national polls in Sitapur, on Tuesday said his party would contest all 80 Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh in the 2024 national elections.
The SP has named 31 candidates for the Madhya Pradesh polls. Vyasji Gond, the party’s Madhya Pradesh poll in charge, said they would try to field candidates on all 230 seats.
The SP has been looking to expand outside Uttar Pradesh to become a national party.
It has since its inception in 1992 been a regional party. The SP registered its biggest success outside Uttar Pradesh in Madhya Pradesh in 2003 when it won seven of the 161 seats it contested. In the 2018 assembly elections, it contested 52 seats and won one seat. The lone lawmaker has since defected to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Uttar Pradesh Congress chief Ajay Rai on Tuesday asked SP to fully support the Congress in Madhya Pradesh as it has no support base there.
The SP is believed to have demanded 12 seats, HT reported.
INDIA constituents in September resolved to contest the 2024 elections together “as far as possible” and said seat-sharing arrangements in states will be initiated immediately and concluded at the earliest in a “collaborative spirit of give-and-take”.
