After Bahujan Samaj Party, Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav literally dumped the Congress, ruling out any possibility of alliance with it for the Assembly polls in the cow belt of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh.
“The Congress has made us wait too long. How much longer should we wait? The SP will speak to the BSP for a pre-poll tie-up in these states. We will also speak to former ally Gondwana Gantantra Party (GGP) in Madhya Pradesh,” Akhilesh said while addressing media persons in Lucknow on Saturday.
Earlier on Wednesday, the SP chief had urged the Congress to show magnanimity, saying any delay in seat sharing talks might prompt other parties to declare their candidates for the upcoming Assembly elections.
“In case the tie-up does not happen, they (Congress) might be levelling charges of us colluding with the Bharatiya Janata Party,” Akhilesh had told reporters.
Congress state leaders have cited Mayawati’s “unrealistic demand” during seat sharing talks as one that would benefit the BJP. Senior leader Digvijay Singh had even said that Mayawati was not stitching the alliance with the Congress because of investigations into corruption cases against her.
An irked, Mayawati had announced on Wednesday that she would not contest polls in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan in alliance with the Congress at any cost.
Mayawati was widely being seen as the X factor in any opposition grouping after she made a winning combination with Akhilesh Yadav to snatch key BJP seats in the Lok Sabha and Assembly bypolls in Uttar Pradesh.
But the math was harder across the negotiating table, as over the past weeks, it became increasingly clear that the BSP-Congress seat-sharing talks were a no-go.
Mayawati demanded 40 of Madhya Pradesh’s 231 seats with a package deal in Rajasthan. While MP Congress was agreeable to a deal with a rider on the number of seats to be offered, the Rajasthan Congress opined that it would be Mayawati who would benefit from any seat-sharing in the state.
After the BSP-Congress talks on a tie-up fell through, Mayawati announced to align with Congress discard Ajit Jogi for the Chhattisgarh polls. Jogi is said to have enough firepower to singe the party in Chhattisgarh it hoped to win after BJP’s 15-year rule.
Mayawati, however, left the window open for a tie-up in the 2019 general elections, for which the opposition plans to join forces against the BJP.