At quiet Delhi meet, Akhilesh Yadav, Mayawati work on Lok Sabha seat math

Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Akhilesh Yadav met Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) president Mayawati in New Delhi on Friday as the two leaders discussed a possible tie-up to take on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the Lok Sabha elections this summer, a person familiar with the development said.

After the meeting that lasted for over two hours, Akhilesh drove to the residence of SP Rajya Sabha member Ram Gopal Yadav, where BSP leader Satish Mishra, also a Rajya Sabha member, joined them for further discussions.

The talks, for now, did not account for the Congress. The person quoted above, who did not want to be named, said the initial talks proposed that both parties will equally distribute between them 78 Lok Sabha seats. They won’t field candidates in Amethi and Rae Bareli, the Lok Sabha constituencies of Congress president Rahul Gandhi and his mother Sonia Gandhi, respectively. Uttar Pradesh has 80 Lok Sabha seats, the highest in the country.

Rajendra Chaudhary, the SP’s Uttar Pradesh spokesperson, confirmed the development but said he did not know what transpired at the meeting. He said similar meetings between the two leaders have happened in the past.

Mayawati is believed to be insisting on a couple of seats more. She also wants that any prospective partner, such as the Rashtriya Lok Dal of Jat leader Ajit Singh, should be accommodated in the alliance from the SP quota. Singh is tipped to get two-three seats if he joins the BSP alliance. If this formula is accepted, it will mean the SP will contest fewer seats than the BSP in the national elections.

Akhilesh and Mayawati have so far ruled out Congress as a partner of the alliance, because the grand old party is looking at contesting more than a dozen seats, which the SP and the BSP are not ready to concede, said another leader familiar with negotiations.

Mayawati is likely to arrive in Lucknow within a few days to hold a meeting of party leaders and office-bearers. In the state, she will discuss the pre-poll alliance with SP and Lok Sabha election strategy, said a BSP leader who did not want to be named.

The SP and the BSP, traditional arch-rivals in Uttar Pradesh politics, joined hands for last year’s by-elections for the Gorakhpur and Phulpur parliamentary seats, vacated by Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath and deputy chief minister Keshav Prasad Maurya. The SP won both the seats. In the by-election to Kairana parliamentary election held later in 2018, SP’s Tabassum Hasan fought on an RLD ticket and defeated the BJP candidate. The BSP did not field a candidate.

(with inputs from Lucknow)