Buoyed by the Lok Sabha election results, the SP and Congress may join forces in the Uttar Pradesh by-elections.

Encouraged by their victory in the Lok Sabha elections, the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Indian National Congress are set to jointly contest the by-elections to 10 Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh.

“Our alliance is based on ideology and mutual trust. We won in the Lok Sabha and were able to reduce the BJP’s tally of seats in Uttar Pradesh to 33. We won 43 seats and this partnership will continue in the by-elections as well. The decision on seat allocation will be taken by the central leadership. But we are confident of defeating the BJP,” Uttar Pradesh Congress general secretary Anil Yadav said. Hindu.

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By-elections were necessitated as nine state legislators, including SP chairman Akhilesh Yadav, won Lok Sabha seats. Yadav, who won from Kalhar in the 2022 state assembly elections, won the Kannauj Assembly seat. SP state legislators Ziaur Rehman Bhalkh, Lalji Verma and Awadhesh Prasad have also made it to the Assembly, vacating Kundalki, Katekhali and Mirchipur seats respectively. While Bhalkh won in the Sambhal Assembly seat, Lalji Verma and Awadhesh Prasad won in Ambedkar Nagar and Faizabad respectively.

Four Bharatiya Janata Party MPs, Anoop Valmiki (Khair), Atul Garg (Ghaziabad), Praveen Patel (Phurpur) and Vinod Bhind (Majhawan), were elected to the Lok Sabha. Meerapur MP Chandan Chauhan of the National League for Democracy (RLD) won the Lok Sabha election from Bijnor.

The Shishamau Vidhan Sabha seat will fall vacant as Socialist MP Irfan Solanki is set to be disqualified after serving a seven-year prison sentence in an arson case.

Most of the seats where by-elections will be held are local seats where the BJP and SP had gone head-to-head, except Meerapur, where the RLD had defeated the BJP in the 2022 state assembly elections.

The SP has signalled its intention to contest these seats. “Our alliance will definitely continue. There is no doubt about it. The SP has contested most of these seats in 2022. But each activist of the alliance will come together and defeat the BJP,” SP national spokesperson Sunil Singh Yadav ‘Sajan’ said.

The BJP candidate Dolly Sharma won more than half a million votes in the Lok Sabha election, giving the party an advantage in Ghaziabad and Meerapur.