Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav and Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati will address a joint press meet in Lucknow on Saturday, amid talks of seat sharing for Lok Sabha polls from which the Congress seems to be out.
This was announced on Friday by SP national secretary Rajendra Choudhary and BSP national general secretary SC Misra. Both the parties have decided to join hands as they face existential crisis following their rout in two successive elections — 2014 Lok Sabha election and 2017 Uttar Pradesh assembly polls.
BSP chief Mayawati will do most of the talking with the media while Akhilesh Yadav is likely to field the questions raised by the media. The top leadership of both the parties had met in New Delhi recently to discuss broad parameters of an alliance to take on the Bharatiya Janata Party unitedly in the Lok Sabha elections.
The joint press conference at a posh hotel here will be the first after the parties gave contours of an electoral alliance ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. The two party chiefs had given their “in principle” approval to the alliance, which has shut its doors to the Congress in the UP.
Sources said that both SP and BSP are planning to contest on 37 seats each out of the 80 on offer in Uttar Pradesh and plan to leave just two, Rae Bareli and Amethi, for the Congress. Smaller parties like Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD), Peace Party and Nishad Party are also likely to be in the alliance.
In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP and its allies had won 73 of the 80 seats in UP.
In March 2018, Akhilesh and Mayawati had decided to bury their differences and pool in their resources to contest three bypolls to Lok Sabha seats in UP and won all of them. It gave them hope that if they teamed up, they could pull voters away from the BJP. The mahagathbandhan arithmetic had worked in the bypolls as a consolidation of OBC, Dalit and Muslim votes powered the joint opposition candidates to victory in Gorakhpur, Phulpur and Kairana last year.
If they replicate their success in the 2019 parliamentary polls, it could upset the apple cart of the BJP, which recently lost three major state elections.
In the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, BJP won 71 of the 80 seats in UP by getting 42.63 per cent of votes while two other seats were won by its allies Apna Dal (Sonelal). In comparison, the SP won five seats by getting 22.35 per cent of votes but the BSP drew a blank even after polling 19.77 per cent of votes.
During the 2017 UP Assembly polls, the BJP won 315 seats with a vote share of 39.7 per cent, a drop of around 3 per cent from the Lok Sabha votes. However, the SP won 48 seats by polling 22 per cent votes while the BSP got bagged 18 seats by receiving 22.2 per cent of votes. As per simple arithmetic, the total votes polled by the SP and BSP were more than BJP’s in both 2014 and 2017 elections.
The haste to announce the mahagathbandan apparently comes to counter the political controversy over reports that the CBI is expected to question Akhilesh Yadav in the illegal mining case.
The SP chief has, however, said that he is ready to face the CBI when Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced in Agra recently that the CBI probe would continue even if there was a political pressure.
The BSP has also rallied behind Akhilesh, alleging that the BJP-led Central government was trying to use the CBI for political means.