Akhilesh Yadav has not tied up with the Congress since the Uttar Pradesh assembly election last year
Highlights
- Akhilesh Yadav has not tied up with Congress yet this time
- Samajwadi Party and Congress had tied up for UP polls last year
- Uttar Pradesh assembly polls result was disastrous for them
A week before the assembly polls in Madhya Pradesh, Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav said he was "thankful" to the Congress for not tying up with him and Mayawati as it left him free to criticize them. The Samajwadi leader -- who recently announced his first list of candidates, declaring the Congress had made them "wait too long" - taunted that they were "ready even today".
"I am thankful to the Congress for not forming an alliance with the Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party. Now we can tell them their failures. It is because of their faulty policies that the BJP is in power today," Mr Yadav said at the release of his party's manifesto in Bhopal.
"We even today say that the elections are not over as yet. We are ready even today," Mr Yadav added. "They (Congress) should take Samajwadi Party, Bahujan Samaj Party and Gondwana Ganatantra Party with them and I can say that they will win more than 200 seats in Madhya Pradesh".
Akhilesh Yadav had not tied up with the Congress since last year's assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, where their alliance was steamrolled by the BJP. The Yadav leader, had however, indicated that despite the defeat, he was open to an alliance with the Congress in future.
That the Congress wasn't ready for an alliance with the BJP was another reason why the tie-up Samajwadi Party fell through.
"That party was ready to allot seats to SP in Madhya Pradesh elections. However, we told them that the election is going to be a big battle and we need to include the BSP in the alliance, but the Congress was not ready. So, our alliance could not materialise," Mr Yadav told reporters.
Mayawati - with whom the Samajwadi leader forged an alliance despite decades of rivalry - has ruled out any alliance with the Congress in the current round of elections.
The BSP chief had demanded 40 of Madhya Pradesh's 231 seats, but with a package deal in Rajasthan, which was not acceptable to the Congress leaders from the desert state. She ruled out an alliance after senior Congress leader Digvijaya Singh remarked that she was not signing a deal with the Congress to keep off the pressure of investigations into the corruption cases against her.
Elections for the 230 assembly seats of Madhya Pradesh will be held on November 28. The counting of votes will take place on December 11.