Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Mulayam Singh Yadav on Wednesday put out his party's first list of 325 candidates for the upcoming Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections, and also ruled out an alliance with any other political party in the all-important electoral state.
Although the SP supremo managed to gloss over the squabble between his son and brother over party tickets, his statement came as a rude jolt for the Congress, which was looking to play kingmaker in Uttar Pradesh and use it as a platform to return to power in the state and subsequently, the Centre. After all, as Mulayam said on Wednesday: "Whoever wins in UP wins in Delhi."
There is indeed some degree of truth in the statement, given that the state has sent the most number of prime ministers to power since 1947, including Narendra Modi, who was elected to the Lok Sabha from the Varanasi constituency in 2014.
Blow for the Congress
Mulayam, with his statement that the SP would not enter into any coalition for the UP Assembly elections next year, seemed to be overruling son and UP Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav, who had earlier said that an SP-Congress alliance would fetch 300 seats in the state, giving the combine absolute majority.
The Congress, it may be noted, has been out of power for around three decades in UP and had been eyeing a comeback of sorts this time, with at least enough votes to become part of a coalition that would collapse without it. That would allow the party to also put pressure on the coalition partner at the Centre, with threats of pulling out of the UP government if their views differed.
Without a coalition, the chances of the Congress look bleak, given that the party's chief ministerial candidate is the scam-accused former Delhi chief minister Sheila Dixit and poll campaign chief is actor-turned-politician Raj Babbar — neither of whom has any significant political clout.
