The Samajwadi Party is gearing up for hitting the ground across the state for political mobilisation with the objective of winning maximum number of seats in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. The party is working out a strategy to take an aggressive stand against the Bharatiya Janata Party on every issue.
Sources in the SP said the victory in the Mainpuri Lok Sabha and Khatauli assembly by-elections had given the much needed shot in the arm to the party. They said the SP intends to maintain this momentum till the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
During the mobilisation campaign, the SP will fight the perception created by its political opponents that party president Akhilesh Yadav is a reluctant politician, a leader who prefers comfortable life instead of facing the heat and dust of electoral politics and works only on social media platforms like Twitter.
“The party is working on a strategy to give Akhilesh Yadav a new image makeover of a leader who is connected with the people at the grassroots level,” said a SP leader.
He added: “Akhilesh worked hard at the grassroots level during the recent Mainpuri Lok Sabha election. Therefore, the SP won this seat by a huge margin of votes.”
Due to the victory in the Mainpuri Lok Sabha election, the hard work of the SP workers paid off and since then the strategists of the party have decided that Akhilesh Yadav will visit every district in Uttar Pradesh till the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
Apart from this, the party will be seen protesting on the streets against the policies of the BJP government for which a committee has been constituted which will keep an eye on every small issue.
According to SP spokesman Rajendra Chaudhary, the party has been fighting for the people since the day of its inception in 1992 but the BJP diverts the attention from the issues related to the people on the basis of communal lines.
He said the SP would now focus on public issues like roads, public health, law and order, problems faced by farmers at the district, tehsil and block levels. The campaign will be coordinated by district presidents at the district level and at state level a committee of senior party leaders will monitor the campaign.
After the 2022 Uttar Pradesh assembly elections, the SP lost the bypoll held in Azamgarh and Rampur Lok Sabha seats and Gola Gokarannath and Rampur assembly seats. The SP however won the bypoll to Mainpuri Lok Sabha seat and its ally Rashtriya Lok Dal won the bypoll to Khatauli assembly seat in Muzaffarnagar district.
“Akhilesh Yadav has now realised that soft options will not work and he has to take the bull by horns. The electoral politics of Uttar Pradesh cannot be conducted from behind closed doors and it does not send across a positive message among the people,” said a SP leader.
For this reason, Akhilesh Yadav and other senior SP leaders have now started making a new political strategy that is why after the victory in Mainpuri, Akhilesh himself has been seen visiting every district in the state while taking on the BJP.
Recently, after the arrest of SP’s media cell worker Manish Jagan Agarwal, Akhilesh had reached the DGP headquarters following which he visited the Lucknow jail to meet Agarwal. The SP chief has previously met several former and present jailed party MLAs.