Samajwadi celebration Nationwide President Akhilesh Yadav. File.
| Picture Credit score: SANDEEP SAXENA
In a bid to galvanise the celebration cadres and collect seat-wise temper and regional, caste and social calculus forward of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, Samajwadi Celebration (SP) president and former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav is prone to tour all of the 75 districts of the State within the coming months. The central level of Mr. Yadav’s upcoming schedule goes to be the problem of a ‘caste census’, which the celebration believes can unite the Different Backward Castes (OBC) in its favour.
“Our party president will tour each and every district of the State in view of the BJP’s attack on constitutional and democratic rights of Dalits, OBCs and minorities. Caste census is a big issue which we will touch upon during the tour,” Sunil Singh Yadav Sajan, the SP’s nationwide spokesperson, advised The Hindu. The SP chief is prone to maintain conferences with numerous sections of society within the districts, aside from celebration employees, to assemble data on floor realities.
Within the tour schedule, the first focus of the celebration is prone to be its strongholds, together with Ghazipur, Azamgarh and the adjoining districts in japanese U.P.; and Sambhal, Moradabad and adjoining districts to the State’s west. Mr. Yadav goes to deal with a gathering in Ghazipur within the second week of Feburary. The rally comes shut on the heels of the BJP’s January rally within the district, which was attended by its nationwide president J.P. Nadda and U.P. CM Yogi Adityanath.
The SP’s technique for the 2024 polls seems centered on the ‘caste census’ because it believes this may increasingly give wealthy dividends and assist the celebration kind a profitable alliance of the OBCs with Muslims and Dalits below the umbrella of ‘Bahujan’ (backward) unity.
“The rights of the Constitution can be given to different castes and communities only when their count is known. We have been demanding a ‘caste census’ for long and had promised to initiate it within three months of the formation of our government,” Mr. Yadav, who’s repeatedly pushing for a ‘caste census’, stated just lately.
Within the 2022 Vidhan Sabha elections too the celebration’s focus was on Backward Class unity, with Mr. Yadav invoking a well-known dictum, “backward revolution” (‘the rule of Backward Classes”). It helped the party win 111 Assembly segments on its own with roughly 32% votes, and transforming the State’s electoral chessboard into virtually a bi-polar polity. In contrast with the 2017 polls, the celebration greater than doubled its seat share within the State meeting.
Throughout the latest “ Ramcharitmanas controversy”, the celebration tried to shift the main focus to caste, with the SP president alleging the BJP considers him a “Shudra (untouchable)“.
Political circles in Lucknow are also abuzz with indications that the SP, which is signalling for a non-BJP, non-Congress front nationally, is likely to focus on 50-odd Lok Sabha seats for 2024, while keeping its options open for a pre-poll alliance on weak seats with other parties. “We are going to focus on 50-odd seats to win in 2024. You never know what kind of political realignment happens before 2024,” one SP chief stated.
The give attention to 50-odd seats can also be in view of the celebration’s electoral efficiency in earlier Lok Sabha polls and its shrinking base amid the BJP’s upsurge in electorally essentially the most essential State, which sends 80 members to Lok Sabha. In 2019, the SP contested 37 seats out of the 80 when it allied with the Bahujan Samaj Celebration (BSP) and the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD). It gained 5 seats within the polls, the identical as 2014.
“The SP’s electoral base has shrunk. The party won 36 seats in 2004 but in the last three parliamentary elections, its performance dipped. Hence, it will be a wise move to focus on strong seats going into 2024,” Sumit Kumar, a social scientist educating within the College of Delhi, stated.
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