Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav has criticised the leaders of his party joining the Bharatiya Janata Party.
Without naming any leader of his party who defected to the BJP, Akhilesh Yadav said “these leaders are like Rs 2,000 Indian currency notes that can be exchanged”.
The ruling BJP, ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, is strengthening its electoral dominance in Uttar Pradesh as 18 leaders of the opposition, including the SP and Rashtriya Lok Dal, have joined hands with the ruling party.
The leaders of SP and its ally RLD who joined the BJP on Monday include Shalini Yadav, Sahab Singh Saini, Sushma Patel, Jagdish Sonkar, Anshul Verma (all SP) and RLD’s Rajpal Saini and several others. These leaders joined the BJP in the presence of BJP state chief Bhupendra Singh Chaudhary, Deputy Chief Ministers Keshav Prasad Maurya and Brajesh Pathak.
Earlier, Om Prakash Rajbhar, the chief of Suheldev Bhartiya Samaj Party, had returned to the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA).
Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya said that the BJP would win all the 80 Lok Sabha seats of Uttar Pradesh and Narendra Modi would be elected as prime minister for the third consecutive term. He said the challenge for the opposition parties in the 2024 Lok Sabha poll would be to save their security deposits.
Shalini Yadav had joined the SP in 2019 ahead of the Lok Sabha elections after defecting from the Congress. She contested the Lok Sabha election from Varanasi against Prime Minister Narendra Modi. She is the daughter-in-law of late Shyamlal Yadav, former Congress MP from Varanasi and former Union minister. She was the mayoral candidate of Congress in Varanasi in 2017 and had secured around 1.14 lakh votes in the election she lost.
Sahab Singh Saini was an MLA from Saharanpur. Saini was a close aide of former Congress chief minister ND Tiwari. The former SP leader also figured in a controversy over having two wives. He had allegedly married the second wife without divorcing his first wife. He belongs to a backward community in western UP.
Sushma Patel was previously elected as Bahujan Samaj Party MLA and later joined the SP after the 2020 Rajya Sabha elections. She represents the Mungra Badshahpur constituency in Jaunpur district.
Jagdish Sonkar is a four-time MLA from Machhlishahr constituency in Jaunpur district. Sonkar contested the UP assembly election as a SP candidate and defeated his closest rival Anita Rawat from BJP with a margin of 4,179 votes in 2017.
Anshul Verma, former BJP MP from Hardoi, joined the SP ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha polls after he was denied ticket. He represented the Hardoi Lok Sabha constituency from 2014 to 2019.
Rajpal Saini, a RLD leader, was a former BSP MLA and Rajya Sabha member.
