LUCKNOW: As
Samajwadi Party looks for the reasons for its defeat in the UP elections, party patriarch Mulayam is convinced that the alliance with the Congress did SP in and there was absolutely no need for it. Conceding that the BJP reached out to the people with more convincing promises, the SP founder said it was now time for the party to get its act together.
Stating that the alliance had harmed SP in the elections, Mulayam said there was no need for the party to have entered into an alliance when it had contested the 2012 polls independently and was voted to power. "Gathbandhan nahi hota to Samajwadi ki sarkar banti," (SP would have formed the government on its own if it had not entered into an alliance) he said in an interview.
This is not the first time that Mulayam has openly expressed his reservations over SP-Congress alliance. A day after the pact was announced amid much fanfare at a joint press conference by Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi and SP chief Akhilesh Yadav in Lucknow, Mulayam had dismissed the alliance as a wrong move and refused to endorse it. But Akhilesh went ahead with it.
Talking to the media at another event in his native village Saifai on Sunday, he said no one person can be held responsible for the party's poor performance in the elections and there were a host of different reason that led to the debacle. "The BJP played it good and managed to convince the people about the promises it made during the elections, so people voted for the party in the manner they did," he said, adding that it was now for the BJP to live up to the promises that it has made to the people of UP.
Earlier in the day, Mulayam held a closed-door meeting with son Akhilesh at Janeshwar Misra Trust office to assess what went wrong and where in the elections. This was MSY's first-ever visit to Janeshwar Trust office that came into being almost a year ago and housed party's war room in the polls. After the meeting that lasted half an hour, Mulayam left for Saifai where he traditionally celebrates Holi with the entire clan.
Akhilesh will convened a meeting of all the newly elected party MLAs at the party headquarters in Lucknow on March 16 where the party is likely to finalize the name for the leader of opposition. Earlier, both Shivpal Yadav who won the elections from Jaswantnagar and senior leader Azam Khan, the party MLA from Rampur, have held the post of the leader of opposition in the state assembly. This time, however, the choice of the SP chief to nominate the LoP is being watched closely as it is expected to reflect the equations within the Yadav clan after the recent family feud where Shivpal had opnely opposed Akhilesh and his elevation as the party president.