A chance encounter in the high skies between Congress general secretary and Uttar Pradesh in-charge Priyanka Gandhi and Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav has left political circles abuzz as the battle for 2022 Uttar Pradesh assembly polls hots up.
Priyanka, who is set to flag off three ‘Pratigya Yatras’ from Barabanki on Saturday to take to the people various resolutions adopted by the party ahead of the 2022 assembly elections, reportedly met the SP scion on a 1:35 pm Vistara flight from Delhi to Lucknow. Yadav, too, has sounded his party’s poll bugle in a bid to oust the BJP in the assembly polls due early next year.
Although those in the know say that too much must not be read in the ‘meeting’ that was ‘cordial’ but purely coincidental. According to sources who were present on the flight, Priyanka signed off with: “We must meet soon” after the two exchanged pleasantries.
Yadav has been vehemently denying any and all possibilities of tieing up with Congress or any other ‘big party’.
Last week, speaking exclusively to CNN-News18 as he began his campaign with a Vijay Rath Yatra from Kanpur, Yadav said, “Our experience of alliances with bigger parties had been bitter. We therefore now look forward to bringing in smaller parties together and not the bigger ones.”
“I don’t think SP will have any alliance with Congress or BSP,” he asserted.
Facing an uphill task of consolidating its support base in Uttar Pradesh, the Congress recently promised 40 per cent tickets to women in the coming assembly elections slated for early next year. Priyanka said the decision is aimed at making women, who constitute roughly half the vote bank, a “full-fledged partner in power”.
The AICC general secretary has been tasked with regaining the party’s lost ground in the political heartland. Congress could win only seven seats in the 403-member UP house in 2017 polls.
Yadav on Wednesday joined hands with Suheldev Bhartiya Samaj Party chief Om Prakash Rajbhar saying that the two are together in their fights for the Dalits, backwards and other weaker sections of the society. He did not however mention if the two parties will fight the upcoming state assembly polls together and what pre-poll understanding, if any, they have reached.
Having four MLAs in the present house, Rajbhar’s party holds influence in over a dozen districts in UP’s Poorvanchal region.
The BJP had forged a poll alliance with the Suheldev Bhartiya Samaj Party in the 2017 UP assembly elections. SBSP chief Rajbhar was even made a minister in the state government but he resigned later before the 2019 polls.
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