Will SP Defeat Congress in 2024 on the Amethi and Rae Bareli Seats? Akhilesh is planning ‘Revenge’ after being upset by MP fallout

In the winter of 2017, Netaji, the late Mulayam Singh Yadav, counseled his son and current chief minister Akhilesh Yadav to avoid making the grave error of aligning himself with the Congress in the upcoming elections in Uttar Pradesh. He had said to his son, “This won’t help us.”

Surprisingly, Akhilesh proceeded with the alliance while simultaneously awarding the Congress more than 100 seats out of the state’s 400 or so seats. As his father had predicted, the outcome was disastrous; the Congress won only seven seats, and the Samajwadi Party (SP) also failed, giving the BJP a historic victory while riding the Narendra Modi wave. According to a senior SP official, “Akhilesh then learned his lesson that Congress pulls down the SP in Uttar Pradesh and he steered clear of them in 2022, doing much better than 2017.”

This 2017 lesson, where the SP leader has grown to have little patience for the ‘big brother’ mentality of the Congress, is what underlies Akhilesh’s current annoyance with the party. Things have become so bad that some SP members aren’t even discounting the possibility that Akhilesh Yadav would decide to run for office in Amethi and Rae Bareli in 2024 if Congress doesn’t make amends with him.

The tweet by SP spokesman IP Singh on the social networking site X fueled the fury. “SP will run candidates in Rae Bareli and Amethi. Elections for Congress must be held in Kanauj and Azamgarh. Welcome, please. The tagline “I am a daughter, I can fight” didn’t change Congress’ ineffectiveness.

Historically, the SP has not fielded candidates in these strongholds of the Congress, which has assisted it in winning the seats.

But in 2019, Smriti Irani of the BJP defeated Rahul Gandhi in Amethi. Ajay Rai, the state president of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh, has taken an aggressive stance against the SP and has questioned how SP could have lost the Azamgarh Lok Sabha byelection last year if it was so powerful in the state. In response, Akhilesh said that he had an emotional connection with Azamgarh with the Congress, just as they do with Amethi and Rae Bareilly, and that they should be aware of this.

However, the Congress hasn’t exactly been kind to the SP in the approaching polls in Madhya Pradesh, sparing them not even one seat and reiterating that the alliance is solely for the Lok Sabha elections and not the state elections. According to Akhilesh Yadav, Congress ought to have made this clear from the outset of INDIA’s establishment. This is terrible news for India since an irate Akhilesh has promised to repay the Congress in the same currency in 2024.

With 80 Lok Sabha seats, Uttar Pradesh is so crucial for India since a third BJP victory there in 2024 might pave the path for Narendra Modi’s election as prime minister once again. However, with the BSP already leaving the coalition and the SP-Congress relationship already deteriorating, the BJP is laughing all the way to the bank in UP. In UP, the BJP-led coalition won 73 of the state’s 80 seats in 2014, and it now intends to surpass that total in 2024.