Politics, often, has its own ironies. The one staring in the face of SP-Congress alliance can be best described by this Hindustani couplet. “Humain To apnoon ne loota Gairon main kahan dum tha, Meri Kishti hi doobi wahan jahan pani kam thaa.”
The very spirit of the alliance has diminished in at least 22 seats, where the two parties are locking horns, with a sole motive of “fighting till the end”. Four of these twenty-two seats are in the Raebareli and Amethi districts.
The fact that despite Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi and her sister Priyanka's personal intervention on Friday, the alliance could not escape the embarrassment in Raibareli and Amethi -- the very own constituencies of Congress President Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi respectively -- speaks volumes of how the alliance is not without some serious roadblocks.
However, when Priyanka and Rahul kick-started their campaign from Raibareli on Friday, the spirit of the alliance was missing.
Just a few kilometres away from Rahul and Priyanka's rally, in Unchahar, News18 caught up with Samajwadi party candidate and former minister, Manoj Kumar Pandey. “Congress Harao (Defeat Congress) is our call in this constituency,” Pandey said, adding that alliance may be a story elsewhere, “defeating Congress is on our agenda here.”
“UP CM will come to campaign in my constituency on 20th February.”
Even as Pandey was making his party's agenda clear, particularly, in his constituency, Ajay Pal Singh, the Congress candidate from Unchahar shared the stage with Rahul and Priyanka at the rally. No surprise, Rahul decided not to mention the alliance in his speech, for obvious reasons.
Ajay Pal Singh, who won the Unchahar seat on a Congress ticket in 2007, but lost in 2012 by a margin of a few thousand votes, told News18 that Congress was justified in laying claim to the Unchahar seat.
“There is a lot of resentment against Manoj Pandey. The seat should have gone to Congress. Since it didn’t happen, now we will fight it out till the end,” Singh said.
The dynamics are no different in Saraini constituency of Raibarely. Here, Congress's Ashok Singh is contesting against SP's sitting MLA Devendra Pratap Singh. Similarly, in Amethi, it's SP's tainted minister Gayatri Prajapati against Congress's Amita Singh -- wife of Congress MP Sanjay Singh.
And, it is Congress's Md. Naeem, who is challenging SP's sitting MLA Rakesh Pratap Singh in Gauriganj.
But this dichotomy is not just limited to these four seats in Amethi and Raibareli. There are, at least, 18 more seats where there is neither an alliance nor a friendly fight. It's a fight till the finishing line for both SP and the Congress.
This also includes the Lucknow central seat where Congress's Mahroof Khan has refused to back out despite party's order. He is contesting against UP Minister Ravidas Mehrotra. Similarly, Anil Singh in Sohtargarh and Bhagart Ram Mishra in Payagpur, too, have refused to obey the party high command's order to withdraw their candidature.
Other seats, where the SP and Congress are facing off, include Kanpur Cantonment, Bhognipur and Maharjpur in phase 3, Mehrani, Bara, Soraon, Koraon, apart from Saraini and Unchahar in phase 4, Tulsipur, Balrampur, Gaura apart from Gauriganj and Amethi in phase 5, Gorakhpur city and Khajni in Phase 6 and three seats of Mugra, Chanbe and Badshahpur in phase 7.
BJP's state general secretary Vijay Bahadur Pathak, therefore, took a jibe at the alliance. He said, “It's not an alliance of two political parties but just an opportunistic alliance of 2 political scions.”
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