NEW DELHI: SP seeks to contest Assembly elections in other states as it aspires to become a national level party.
After securing a substantial victory in the Lok Sabha elections by bagging 37 seats, the Samajwadi Party is planning to expand its base beyond Uttar Pradesh to the states that are scheduled to hold Assembly elections later this year and next year. The party has started to work on its membership program for the same.
I.P. Singh, Samajwadi Party national spokesperson asserted to The Sunday Guardian that SP was planning to contest the upcoming Haryana, Maharashtra, and Delhi Assembly elections with its alliance partners. He said, “It was the dream of Netaji (late Mulayam Singh) to make the Samajwadi Party a national party and expand it beyond UP to other states. So we are working in this direction, and we are hopeful that a day will come when this dream of Netaji will become a reality.” He further added, “By doing this, we are not going to cause any harm to our alliance partner Congress, but will help them defeat our common rival Bharatiya Janta Party.”
Following the recent good performance of the I.N.D.I.A. bloc in Uttar Pradesh, the stage is set for another confrontation in the forthcoming by-elections for nine Assembly seats. The coalition of the SP and the Congress has demonstrated considerable strength, though questions about the durability of their partnership persist. These by-elections were prompted by the resignations of nine MLAs from the ruling BJP and the SP, who secured seats in the Lok Sabha elections.
SP chief Akhilesh Yadav has emphasised the alliance’s dedication to public service. On the social media platform X, he stated, “The symbol of public aspiration, the I.N.D.I.A. bloc, will stay firm on its commitment towards public service, will stay united, and will continue to be committed towards the Constitution, democracy, reservation, honour-dignity-pride of people, towards eradicating unemployment, price rise, corruption.” At a meeting of the I.N.D.I.A. bloc, after the results of the Lok Sabha elections, he declared, “ The India bloc will stay united. Long live the India bloc.”
Singh said “The alliance with the PDA(pichre, Dalit, alpasankhyak) agenda will once again crush the BJP in the bypolls in UP.” He then alleged, “However we could have performed better and taken the BJP’s numbers further down by winning some more seats, had the BJP not rigged the polls on those seats. We lost some seats by a very narrow margin.” He further said that SP had performed eight times better than it previous performance and had increased its vote share by more than 15 % because of its PDA agenda. PDA refers to “Pichre”, meaning backward, Dalit and Alpasankhyak, meaning minority. SP is of the view that it has been able to carve out the PDA alliance because of a shared sense of oppression that these groups have.