Samajwadi Party names 16 candidates for Lok Sabha elections. Check list

Dimple Yadav, the wife of Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Akhilesh Yadav, will contest from Mainpuri

The Samajwadi Party (SP) on Tuesday named 16 candidates for the upcoming 2024 Lok Sabha elections. 
 

The candidate list includes:

1. Dimple Yadav from Mainpuri

2. Shafiqur Rahman Barq from Sambhal

3. Ravidas Mehrotra from Lucknow

4. Akshay Yadav from Firozabad

5. Devesh Shakya from Etah

6. Dharmendra Yadav from Budaun

7. Utkarsh Verma from Kheri

8. Anand Bhadauria from Dhaurahra

9. Anu Tandon from Unnao

10. Naval Kishore from Farrukhabad

11. Rajaram Pal from Akbarpur

12. Shivshankar Singh Patel from Banda

13. Awadhesh Prasad from Faizabad

14. Lalji Verma from Ambedkar Nagar

15. Ramprasad Chaudhary from Basti

16. Kajal Nishad from Gorakhpur.

The unilateral announcement by the Samajwadi Party, which is a key member of the opposition INDIA bloc in Uttar Pradesh, comes days after Akhilesh Yadav's cryptic social media post on seat-sharing discussions triggered strong speculation in political circles.

On Saturday, Yadav stated that his party's alliance with the Congress is "off to a good start with 11 strong seats [to the Congress]".

"This trend will move forward with the winning equation. 'INDIA' team and 'PDA [backwards, Dalits, and minorities]' strategy will change history," he said in a post on X.

He, however, did not elaborate on which seats the two parties have agreed upon.

When the seat-sharing talks between the two parties began, the Congress had demanded 30 seats, including the 21 it won in Uttar Pradesh in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections. However, the SP was unwilling to accommodate the Congress on more than 13 seats, reported Hindustan Times (HT), citing sources,

Uttar Pradesh has 80 Lok Sabha seats, the highest in the country.

In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP and its ally Apna Dal (Sonelal) won 62 out of the 80 seats in the state. The Samajwadi Party-Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) alliance, which was expected to pose a challenge to the BJP, did not yield the desired results, winning just 15 seats (SP 5 and BSP 10), while the Congress could only bag one seat.