A day after the Samajwadi Party’s defeat in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections, party President Akhilesh Yadav held a day-long meeting with newly elected legislators, candidates, and allies. While the party introspect on the defeat, Mr. Yadav has conveyed to the rank and file to begin work for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
The party was at pains to explain the gap between its expectations of 300-plus seats and the reality of settling for 111. For now, the party is sticking to the narrative that the mandate was stolen by the BJP by tampering with electronic voting machines (EVMs). A section of the party feels that the allies did not shoulder their part of the bargain, while the allies had their own set of complaints.
Mahaan Dal President Keshav Dev Maurya, whose son and wife lost in the elections, told The Hindu that the alliance got overconfident. “The response of people at our rallies and the fact that there was so much discontent somewhere made the alliance complacent. We assumed we will win the election,” Mr. Maurya said after the meeting at the SP headquarters here. He added that the entry of ministers from the Yogi Cabinet also contributed to this overconfidence. “Once Swami Prasad Maurya joined the alliance, we assumed that we are winning and that all non-Yadav OBCs will follow us. But that obviously did not happen,” Mr. Maurya said.
‘BJP misled voters’
There is also a feeling that the SP was not able to communicate a positive message to the electorate and ran a campaign often reacting to the BJP. Ram Singh Patel, SP leader who defeated BJP Minister Rajendra Pratap from the Patti seat, said the BJP managed to mislead. “The BJP successfully misled the electorate from the actual bread and butter issues. Instead of the real issues that we were talking about the BJP ran the campaign on communal and casteist lines,” Mr. Patel said.
There were murmurs among the supporters that the SP started its campaign far too late. The blame was also heaped on the Bahujan Samaj Party for its subpar performance which drove the election into a bipolar contest, painting the SP into a corner. “I do not believe that we made any mistakes. If we had then we would not have improved our tally from 47 to 111. We tried to communicate to our electorate and perhaps we fell short. But in the next few months we shall work harder in preparation for the 2024 elections,” Jaishankar Pandey, Uttar Pradesh vice-president of the party, said after the meeting.
