Former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav was on Thursday unanimously re-elected president of the Samajwadi Party (SP) for the third consecutive time at the national convention held at Rambai Ambedkar Maidan in Lucknow.
The party's national general secretary and election officer, Ram Gopal Yadav, announced the appointment of Mr. Akhilesh Yadav.
In his speech, Mr. Yadav asked the SP cadres to be ready to fill prisons against the misrule. "Samajwadi people should be ready to fill up jails as the time has come. Our leader Neta Ji [Mulayam Singh] has even said that when you are not getting justice then this is the way ahead," said Mr. Yadav.
Many party leaders pitched for Mr. Yadav's candidature for prime ministership, but in his speech, Mr. Yadav, 49, stated that focus should be on the bigger target to defeat the divisive forces which are threatening the harmony of the country. The SP chief attacked the BJP, alleging that the ruling dispensation is against farmers, youth and women.
‘Rise in unemployment’
In its political-economic resolution passed during the convention, the party alleged that unemployment and inflation were rising and the BJP government had failed on all fronts. "Due to the wrong policies of the BJP government, inflation has increased to unimaginable magnitude; it has broken the back of the people. The government is doing no work to control the unemployment rate. It is busy taking away the rights given by the Constitution to Dalits and backward communities," reads the resolution.
The BJP hit back at the SP, calling Mr. Yadav the brand ambassador of propaganda. "Akhilesh Yadav's party will fail to get any seats in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls," said Bhupendra Chaudhary, Uttar Pradesh BJP president.
Set up in 1992, the SP formed government thrice in Uttar Pradesh and continues to be a contender in India's most populous State. The party's major support base comes from M-Y (Muslim and Yadav) community along with sections of other OBCs. Since 2017, Mr. Yadav has been trying to rope in the non-Yadav OBCs and Dalits by forming different alliances in each election. In the 2017 Assembly elections, the SP formed an alliance with the Indian National Congress (INC) while in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, it forged an alliance with the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), both the experiments were unsuccessful. In the recent Assembly polls, the SP formed an alliance with smaller caste-based parties but failed to dislodge the BJP from power. At present, the SP has 111 members in the 403-member Uttar Pradesh Assembly.
