In a major setback to the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) and particularly the Samajwadi Party, the Jayant Chaudhary-led Rashtriya Lok Dal ditched the opposition alliance and joined hands with the Bharatiya Janata Party in Uttar Pradesh for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

This is the fourth setback to the INDIA bloc in a row after Mamata Banerjee, Nitish Kumar and Arvind Kejriwal deserted the alliance.

As per the seat-sharing agreement with the BJP, the RLD will contest two Lok Sabha seats – Baghpat and Bijnor – and has also been promised a seat in the Rajya Sabha.

“Prime Minister Narendra Modi understands the pulse of the nation. Modi ji’s vision has done what any other party could not do till now,” Jayant Chaudhary said in a post on X.

Earlier in January, SP and RLD had finalised a seat-sharing formula under which Jayant’s party was given seven Lok Sabha seats.

RLD has pockets of influence in western Uttar Pradesh and the BJP hopes to gain in this region that is home to the influential Jat community. In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, of the 16 seats that the BJP lost in Uttar Pradesh, seven were from west UP. It lost all six seats in the Moradabad division.

The development comes amid differences over seat sharing between the INDIA bloc constituents in Uttar Pradesh. There remains no breakthrough in seat-sharing talks between the Congress and the SP too.

The Akhilesh Yadav-led SP has, however, gone on to announce its candidates for 16 Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh, catching the Congress off guard. Yadav had said in January that the RLD would be allotted seven seats, but details were not announced.

The RLD and the SP have been allies in Uttar Pradesh since the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. In the 2019 polls, the RLD lost all three seats it contested while the SP won five seats. In the 2022 Uttar Pradesh assembly elections, Akhilesh Yadav’s party won 111 seats out of the 347 it contested, while the RLD won nine of the 33 seats it contested.