The Samajwadi Party has made up its mind on how many seats it will fight on in the upcoming Uttar Pradesh assembly elections but the Congress has asked for 181 out of the 403 seats, SP chief Akhilesh Yadav said on Saturday, asserting that his alliance will win India’s most-populous state.
Speaking at the 24th Hindustan Times Leadership Summit, Yadav refused to speculate whether he had reached out to the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) but said that the Bahujan community – an amalgamation of other backward classes and Dalits – will come together to defeat the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Asked if the Congress had asked for 200, Yadav said: “Slightly less than that”. Asked if they had sought 180, he said: “Add one to 180”.
“Samajwadi Party and us have made up our mind on how many seats we will contest. INDIA coalition will together defeat the BJP,” he added. “Our relationship with the Congress party is very good.”
Yadav – a former chief minister who ruled UP between 2012 and 2017 – also stressed on his development agenda, hit out at the BJP over the controversy in Ram Temple donation irregularities, and expressed confidence that his social coalition of PDA – Pichda or backward, Dalit and Alpsankhyak or minorities – was expanding to include everyone dissatisfied with the BJP. “The people who believe in sanatana, they’re upset with the BJP and this will be seen in the assembly elections,” he said.
{{/usCountry}}Yadav – a former chief minister who ruled UP between 2012 and 2017 – also stressed on his development agenda, hit out at the BJP over the controversy in Ram Temple donation irregularities, and expressed confidence that his social coalition of PDA – Pichda or backward, Dalit and Alpsankhyak or minorities – was expanding to include everyone dissatisfied with the BJP. “The people who believe in sanatana, they’re upset with the BJP and this will be seen in the assembly elections,” he said.
{{/usCountry}}He said that the work of building a grassroots alliance between Dalits and backwards was started by BR Ambedkar and Ram Manohar Lohia, and his party was only taking it forward. He made it a point to underline the BJP’s loss from the Faizabad Lok Sabha seat – under which Ayodhya falls – in 2024.
“The place from where the BJP started its communal and divisive politics, it lost from there. Prabhu Ram punished them,” he said.
Yadav alluded to his upcoming trip to the Ram Temple in Ayodhya – his first. “How could a chief minister who made a world record of going to Ayodhya be unaware that people were stealing the donations made to Lord Ram and hurting the sentiments of millions of devotees?” he asked.
He didn’t deny that his party wanted to expand its alliance but refused to comment on the erosion of the Mayawati-led BSP. “I do not want to comment on any particular political party. Let us talk about the community instead.” The BSP’s lone lawmaker in the Uttar Pradesh assembly died in August, and the party has no seats in Parliament.
Yadav accused the BJP of misleading not just certain communities, but the entire country. He cited the setbacks faced by the BJP in the 2026 legislative council polls – when the SP retained both the graduate and teacher seats in Varanasi, represented in the Lok Sabha by Modi, bagged the Agra teacher seat, the Allahabad-Jhansi graduate seat and the Lucknow graduate seat – and the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, when the SP became the single-largest party in UP.
“When the [BJP] government was formed [at the Centre in 2014], Uttar Pradesh played a major role in bringing it to power. ...Even when the government was formed again in 2019, Uttar Pradesh played a decisive role. And today, when the BJP has lost ground in Uttar Pradesh, the government at the Centre is an alliance government. It is not a BJP government on its own,” he said.
Yadav said the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP)’s protests were against the BJP, adding that the protests started with the NEET paper leak after middle- and lower-class students saw how the government was toying with their future. “It was not just a youth movement; they had the support of their parents. The SP has always been with the youth and for the youth. Gen Z wants clarity, not fake promises,” he said.
He accused the BJP of compromising with the future of young people. “Look at what they’ve done – there are no jobs for young men and women, they have tried to destroy army recruitment by bringing in Agniveer, and they have allowed so many paper leaks. This is why people are upset,” he said.
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The assembly elections in UP are coming against the backdrop of sweeping street protests against the government and the Opposition’s surprisingly good performance in the 2024 polls. The Congress-SP alliance won 43 of the 80 Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh and polled 43.52% of the votes. The Congress bagged six of the 17 seats it contested and secured 9.46% of the votes. The BJP’s seats fell from 62 in 2019 to 33, pushing its overall tally below the majority mark in Parliament for the first time since 2014.
The Congress contested the 2022 Uttar Pradesh polls on its own but could win just two seats, faring worse than its seven-seat show in 2017. The SP won 111 seats in 2022.