Gurugram: The Samajwadi Party (SP) is preparing to contest the Haryana assembly elections scheduled for later this year, a move that may benefit the Congress as the Akhilesh Yadav-led party can potentially eat into the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Ahir votebank — most Ahirs identify themselves as part of the Yadav community.
The SP is eyeing six to eight constituencies that have sizeable populations of Muslims and Ahirs.
Dr Sanjay Lathar, a former leader of the Opposition in the Uttar Pradesh Vidhan Parishad, told ThePrint that Yadav had asked him to identify six to eight winnable seats.
“Ten seats in the Uttar Pradesh Legislative Assembly are likely to go for bypolls soon. Since the Congress contested the Lok Sabha polls with the SP as an ally under the INDIA bloc, the Congress wants to have a share in these seats. However, the SP would also like the Congress to accommodate the SP in Haryana and Maharashtra, the two states that will go to polls in October this year along with Jharkhand, by sharing a few seats. That is why our leader Akhilesh Yadav has asked us to identify the seats.”
Lathar said that SP was looking for winnable seats in Gurugram, Rewari and Mahendragarh districts, where there are many Yadavs and Muslims.
In 2005, Lathar contested the Haryana assembly elections as an SP candidate from the Julana constituency in Jind district and won 4,983 votes.
He told ThePrint that the Congress had been continuously losing not just the seats in the districts of Gurugram, Rewari, and Mahendragarh but also those in other districts such as Karnal, Sonipat, Faridabad and Palwal, which are located along the borders of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh.
“Our party workers have relationships in these districts and hence, the SP can be helpful not only by winning a few seats but also by helping the Congress perform better in these districts,” said Lathar.
Bhupinder Singh Hooda, leader of the Opposition in the Haryana assembly, told ThePrint that as of now, there was no move for an alliance with the SP for the assembly elections in Haryana. “In case any development is to take place in this regard in the coming days, it will happen at the level of the central leadership of the Congress. Right now, there is no such move.”
Ten assembly seats in Uttar Pradesh have fallen vacant and are likely to go for bypolls either at the same time as the assembly elections in Haryana or before that.
Nine of these seats are now vacant due to their MLAs being elected as MPs. These include Karhal, vacated by Yadav after he won the Kannauj constituency in the Lok Sabha elections. The remaining seat is Sisamau, which fell vacant after MLA Irfan Solanki was sentenced to a seven-year jail term in an arson case earlier this month.
Of these seats, the SP won five in 2022, the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) won one in alliance with the SP, the BJP won three, and the NISHAD Party won one in alliance with the BJP.
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Congress’s performance in seats being eyed by SP
Gurugram, Mahendragarh, and Rewari districts have 11 assembly seats in total. Of these, the Congress won just two in 2019 — the Mahendragarh and Rewari seats.
The BJP won the Gurgaon, Sohna and Pataudi seats in Gurugram district, while an Independent won Badshahpur. Of the four seats in the Mahendragarh district, the BJP won Ateli, Narnaul and Nangal Chaudhry. In the Rewari district, the Bawal and Kosli assembly seats went to the BJP.
In the 2014 Haryana assembly elections, the BJP made a clean sweep in UP, winning all 11 seats in Gurugram, Rewari, and Mahendragarh districts.
In the 2024 general elections, BJP candidates were leading in 10 out of 11 assembly seats in these three districts, with the Congress managing a very small lead in the Kosli assembly segment of the Rewari district, where Deepender Hooda got just two votes more than BJP candidate Arvind Sharma.
Since 2014, the Congress has been trailing behind BJP candidates in constituencies along Haryana’s border with Uttar Pradesh, such as Sonipat, Karnal, Panipat City, Panipat Rural, Palwal and Tigaon. In the 2024 parliamentary elections, too , BJP candidates were leading over their Congress rivals in all these seats.
(Edited by Radifah Kabir)
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