New Delhi: The Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party on Thursday announced that they would field candidates from 37 and 38 Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh respectively, leaving three for the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) and the two Gandhi family bastions of Amethi and Rae Bareli for the Congress.
However, SP patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav expressed his displeasure with the alliance, questioning why SP chief and his son Akhilesh Yadav had agreed to give half the seats to the BSP.
An official document signed by BSP chief Mayawati and SP president Akhilesh Yadav was released which gave the break-up of the seats each party would contest.
The seats that SP would contest include Kairana, Moradabad, Sambhal, Rampur, Mainpuri, Firozabad, Badaun, Bareilly, Lucknow, Etawah, Kanpur, Kannauj, Jhansi, Banda, Allahabad, Kaushambi, Phulpur, Faizabad, Gonda, Gorakhpur, Azamgarh, Varanasi and Mirzapur. The BSP will field candidates from Saharanpur, Bijnor, Nagina, Aligarh, Agra, Fatehpur Sikri, Dhaurahara, Sitapur, Sultanpur, Pratapgarh, Kaiserganj, Basti, Salempur, Jaunpur, Bhadohi and Deoria, among other constituencies.
Earlier the two parties had said that they would fight 38 seats each, leaving four for others, which would have effectively meant that the RLD gets to fight only on two seats. However, RLD chief Jayant Chowdhary had held a series of meetings with Mr Yadav following which SP has given one seats from it own quota to the RLD.
