Mulayam Yadav claimed that candidates fielded by son for Gujarat elections will lose. (File)
Samajwadi Party patron Mulayam Singh Yadav today claimed that the five candidates fielded by his son Akhilesh Yadav in the Gujarat Assembly elections would lose.
"Akhilesh has fielded five candidates in Gujarat Assembly elections but they will lose all the seats," he told reporters in Mainpuri after attending a private function.
"...Akhilesh had taken a wrong decision to forge a political alliance with the Congress and had suffered on that account," he said, referring to the tie-up between the Samajwadi Party and the Congress ahead of the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections in February-March this year.
The BJP swept the elections, winning 312 seats out of the total 403. The Samajwadi Party won 47 and the Congress seven.
Mr Yadav also said that Mainpuri was his home turf and in the Lok Sabha elections in 2019, he will contest from the Mainpuri parliamentary constituency.
Replying to a question related to the issues surrounding the use of electronic voting machines EVMs), he said: "EVMs were imported from Japan, but Japan has returned to ballot paper system of voting."
The SP patron reiterated that Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar should be expelled from the party for his "neech" remark against Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
"He (Prime Minister Narendra Modi) is an elected leader and the comments were worst in the civilised society and the person making such comments should be expelled from the party," Mr Yadav said.
He said positive politics has virtually vanished, and "politics of mud-slinging" has become a common norm, pointing out that "there has been a paradigm shift in the country's politics."
Mr Aiyar was suspended from Congress earlier this week after he called Modi a 'neech kism ka aadmi' (vile sort of man).