SP-BSP alliance may not last long

| | Lucknow
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SP-BSP alliance may not last long

Saturday, 25 May 2019 | PNS | Lucknow

Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party are likely to be back to being rivals in Uttar Pradesh again.

The alliance formed by these two major opposition parties in UP along with Ajit Singh-led Rashtriya Lok Dal has failed to achieve the desired objective of consolidating Dalit-OBC-Muslim-Jat vote bank and more importantly, the transfer of votes to each other in the just-concluded Lok Sabha elections.

Besides, SP chief Akhilesh Yadav’s wife Dimple Yadav and his two cousins Dharmendra Yadav from Budaun and Akshay Yadav from Firozabad have lost the election.

Rashtriya Lok Dal chief Ajit Singh and his son Jayant Chaudhary have also been defeated in Muzaffarnagar and Baghpat, respectively.

On May 23, the day the Lok Sabha results were announced, SP chief Akhilesh Yadav asked party cadre to start preparing for the 2022 UP Assembly polls. The same day, Akhilesh presided over a meeting of officer-bearers of his party for starting a door-to-door campaign across the state.

“The SP-BSP coalition of Akhilesh Yadav and Mayawati will not survive now. The next big goal for both parties is the 2022 Assembly election, in which they could be back to being fierce rivals. The Lok Sabha poll results in UP were not a surprise as transfer of votes between alliance partners was going to be difficult and it ultimately did not happen,” said a SP leader, who unsuccessfully contested the recent election.

UP witnessed triangular contests in 2019 elections and friendly fights between Congress and alliance candidates benefited the Bharatiya Janata Party. Had it been a duel between SP-BSP alliance and Congress on one side and the BJP on the other, things could have been tougher for the ruling party. But going by the huge victory margins of BJP winners in UP, the results would not have been different even then.

The alliance was formed to challenge the BJP and oust Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The basic premise was that the SP-BSP votes would be transferred to each other but it did not happen at all on most seats, and only partially in a few constituencies. This explains why the alliance candidates could win only 15 seats in UP.

In the just-concluded polls in UP, the BJP won 62 seats and its ally Apna Dal (Sonelal) two. Although the BJP lost nine seats – it had won 71 in 2014 — its vote share went up from 42.3 percent in 2014 to nearly 49.5 per cent this time.

The Congress could win just one seat from UP while the performance of the alliance was below par with just 15 seats.

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