Will spring surprise in UP assembly by-polls: SP

The Samajwadi Party Sunday claimed that results of the upcoming by-polls to 12 assembly seats in the state will spring a surprise and it will grab the lion's share in the seats. "Booth-level work has already been completed by party workers in the most place. Like the by-polls to Phulpur, Gorakhpur and Kairana parliamentary constituencies and the Noorpur assembly seat, the results of the upcoming by-polls will also spring a surprise and the SP will grab the lion's share," SP leader and former UP minister Arvind Singh Gope told PTI.

The SP leader said the by-polls will set the "tone for the 2022 UP assembly elections", adding that their endeavour was to reach the last man in the village. When asked about the break-up of the SP-BSP alliance, Gope said, "Despite the break-up of the alliance, there is no loss to the SP. Akhileshji is a large-hearted man. He had forged the alliance with a large heart. It was the BSP, which left us. We respect their views."

The senior SP leader said forging the alliance was a major experiment and it was not necessary that every experiment succeeded. The SP and BSP had announced their tie-up for the Lok Sabha polls in January this year, sharing 38 seats each and keeping the Congress out of the tie-up.

With the electoral tie-up between the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party coming to an end after the Lok Sabha debacle, the by-polls to the 12 assembly seats in Uttar Pradesh are likely to witness a four-cornered contest. The alliance could bag just 15 of 80 seats in the state in the Lok Sabha elections this year, after which the BSP parted ways with the SP.

The Lok Sabha elections this year and the 2017 UP assembly elections were rather a triangular fight. The Samajwadi Party had contested the 2017 assembly polls in an alliance with the Congress.

In the 2014 parliamentary elections, the BJP, Congress, SP, BSP and the RLD had contested individually in the state. The upcoming by-polls to 11 assembly seats will be held as the sitting MLAs were elected to the Lok Sabha while the vacancy in Hamirpur was caused due to The disqualification of BJP legislator Ashok Kumar Singh Chandel following conviction in a murder case.

The assembly constituencies that fell vacant following the election of sitting MLAs as MPs are Manikpur, Iglas (SC), Zaidpur (SC), Gangoh, Balha (SC), Rampur, Jalalpur, Pratapgarh, Lucknow Cantonment, Govindnagar and Tundla (SC). Meanwhile, state BJP media coordinator Rakesh Tripathi claimed that their party would emerge stronger in the elections.

He said, "Irrespective of the fact that the elections will be a four-cornered or multi-cornered contest, the BJP will emerge the strongest. We have learnt our lessons from previous by-poll defeats and the party has already started its poll preparations". "The by-polls will also give an opportunity to the party to increase its tally in the UP Assembly and win from Rampur and Jalalpur, which we had lost in the 2017 assembly polls," he asserted.

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)