The Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party are likely to share a major chunk of the parliamentary seats in Uttar Pradesh for 2019 elections.
SP president Akhilesh Yadav has indicated that his party is ready to make sacrifice in favour of the BSP. The SP may contest 35 seats, leaving 40 seats for Mayawati-led BSP. The remaining five seats would be allotted to other alliance partners.
If indications of such a seat-sharing formula are anything to go by, it comes as a major setback for the Congress which the SP and the BSP want to keep out of the alliance.
According to SP senior leaders, the Congress will be kept out of the alliance, but neither the BSP nor the SP will field any candidate in Amethi and Raebareli—constituencies of Congress president Rahul Gandhi and UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi respectively. Two to three seats of western Uttar Pradesh would be given to the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) of Chaudhary Ajit Singh.
It may be recalled that the SP and the Congress had joined hands in the last assembly elections, but the alliance failed miserably to take on the BJP, which bagged a grand victory by winning 325 seats.
The SP–BSP think tanks believe that the Congress has lost its base badly in Uttar Pradesh and has failed to woo backwards, dalits and Muslims. Therefore, they feel, it would be futile to make the Congress an alliance partner and share seats with it.
In the recently held assembly bypolls, too, Congress fared badly. In Phulpur and Gorakhpur bypolls, the Congress, which had fought alone, could bag only three and two per cent of the total votes cast.
There was no opposition unity in Uttar Pradesh in the last parliamentary polls in 2014, and each of these three major parties fared poorly. Out of the 80 parliamentary seats, the SP had bagged only five and the Congress two while the BSP had failed to open its account. Rest of the seats had gone to the BJP.
The good show of the saffron party in the ensuing assembly elections, too, prompted the opposition parties to join hands and contest unitedly.