Had sensed defeat after first round itself, says SP ally O P Rajbhar

LUCKNOW: Om Prakash Rajbhar, whose Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (

SBSP

) fought the recently concluded Uttar Pradesh assembly elections in alliance with the SP, said on Saturday that he could sense their defeat after the first phase itself but chose to remain quiet "like a doctor who never tells the family of a patient that he was going to die till he dies".

Two days after the UP assembly election results were declared and the BJP emerged victorious with 255 seats and Samajwadi Party (SP) came a distant second with 111 seats, SBSP chief Rajbhar said that the alliance failed to read the mind of the voters. The SBSP improved its performance from the 2017 elections and won six seats out of the 19 that it contested. In the 2017 elections, the SBSP won four seats in alliance with the BJP.

"How could I have talked about losing at that time as there were six more phases to go. Mahaul toh banana hi tha, nateejon ka intezaar toh karna hi tha," he told reporters. Rajbhar won from the

Zahoorabad

seat of Ghazipur for the second time while his son Arvind Rajbhar lost from Shivpur seat in Varanasi against BJP's Anil Rajbhar.

"We will review our performance and figure out why we failed," he said, adding that the SP-led alliance performed very well on seats where the SBSP was working for years at the ground level in districts like Ghazipur, Azamgarh, Mau, Ballia, Basti, Ambedkarnagar and Jaunpur.

He also attacked the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and held it responsible for the defeat of the SP alliance. Rajbhar said that though the BSP is a national party, the SBSP has performed way better and has emerged a bigger party than the former.

"We have won six seats and the BSP has won only one. The BSP has been working to make the BJP win and in doing so, the party has got restricted to only one seat. Where is Babasaheb's mission?"

The SBSP was one of the alliance partners of the Samajwadi Party along with the RLD, AD(K) and NCP.


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