The Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) has forged its fourth political alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) with Jayant Chaudhary emerging as the third-generation torchbearer from the family and the party to collaborate with the saffron party.
Though the RLD has experimented with alliances with almost all political parties, its alliance with the BJP has always been most rewarding to it. Party men recall that the RLD’s (then Lok Dal) first political alliance with the BJP was for the municipal polls in Delhi back in 1983 and it, according to them, successfully took on the Congress.
“BJP has been our natural ally for decades. Many people may not know that our first alliance with the BJP was in 1983 when former Lok Dal founder Chaudhary Charan Singh and the then BJP president Atal Bihari Vajpayee came together to forge an alliance against the Congress in Delhi civic polls,” RLD national general secretary Trilok Tyagi said.
“After that, we had alliance with the BJP on two other occasions in U.P. and the latest one is the fourth,” he added. RLD, it is seen, has given its best performance when it was in an alliance with the BJP in U.P., either in assembly polls or the Lok Sabha elections.
The party led by Jayant Chaudhary’s father and former Union minister Ajit Singh had its second alliance with the BJP in 2002 in Uttar Pradesh. The party’s electoral history shows that its best-ever performance in terms of number of seats won in the U.P. assembly elections was in 2002 only when it captured 14 of the 38 seats the party contested in alliance with the BJP under Rajnath Singh.
{{/usCountry}}The party led by Jayant Chaudhary’s father and former Union minister Ajit Singh had its second alliance with the BJP in 2002 in Uttar Pradesh. The party’s electoral history shows that its best-ever performance in terms of number of seats won in the U.P. assembly elections was in 2002 only when it captured 14 of the 38 seats the party contested in alliance with the BJP under Rajnath Singh.
{{/usCountry}}Its vote share in the seats contested was also the highest at 26.82% then though the vote share against the total valid votes polled was only 2.48% that was lower than the vote share of 3.70% the party had in 2007 elections when the party won 10 of 254 seats on its own. The party’s vote share in the seats contested in 2007 was 5.76%.
In alliance with the Congress in 2012 assembly polls, the RLD won 9 of 46 seats in fought getting 20.5% of the vote share in the seats contested and 2.33% against the total valid votes cast in the state. The party went solo in 2017 assembly polls and could manage to win only one seat, that is, Chaprauli in Baghpat but the lone MLA Sahendra Singh Ramala later joined the BJP in 2018.
The RLD’s third alliance (second in U.P.) with the BJP came in 2009 Lok Sabha polls and again its performance was recorded to be the best in parliamentary polls. That year, it won five of the seven seats in alliance with the BJP. The five seats also included Baghpat and Mathura won by Ajit Singh and Jayant Chaudhary respectively. Earlier, in 2004 LS polls, the RLD contested in alliance with the SP and won three seats only.
The RLD moved out of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance before U.P. assembly polls in 2012 to join the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance but drew a black in 2014 Lok Sabha elections as it lost all the eight seats it fought.
In 2019 LS polls again, the party had to face a humiliating defeat. Despite joining the grand alliance formed by the SP and the BSP, the RLD lost all the three seats it contested. Ajit Singh and Jayant Chaudhary were two of the three losers.
However, the party under Jayant Chaudhary managed its revival in 2022 assembly polls by winning nine seats as an ally of the SP. In opposition for 10 years, assailing the BJP on all possible occasions, Jayant Chaudhary, somehow, started feeling worried about his and his party’s political future after the much-touted INDIA bloc started going sixes and sevens after the consecration of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya changed political equations in the country and the state.
And the Modi government’s announcement to confer the Bharat Ratna, the country’s highest civilian honour, on his grandfather and former PM Chaudhary Charan Singh gave Jayant a ‘much needed’ excuse to walk out of the INDIA alliance and join the BJP-led NDA.
He made a formal announcement on his joining the NDA through a post on X on Saturday evening after meeting BJP national president JP Nadda and Union home minister Amit Shah, marking his party’s fourth electoral tie-up with the BJP since 1983.