Akhilesh’s PDA push helps INDIA win UP

Sandeep Dikshit

New Delhi, June 4

The victory of Samajwadi Party’s (SP) Awadesh Prasad in Faizabad, the ground zero of the Ram Mandir issue, typifies the change in the approach by Akhilesh Yadav after four consecutive and humiliating losses in 2014, 2017, 2019 and 2022.

Prasad, pitted against six-time MLA and two-term BJP MP Lallu Prasad, is a Dalit and shows Akhilesh’s successful shift to a Pichda Dalit Alpsankhyak (PDA) alliance instead of continuing to bank on the Muslim-Yadav combination, which tended to restrict his party to a glass ceiling of about 35 per cent votes in many constituencies.

The SP-Congress ‘Gathbandhan’ has won 44 out of the 80 seats at stake in UP and played an important role in stopping the BJP from achieving a majority on its own in the Lok Sabha as against the Tejsavi Yadav led alliance in neighbouring Bihar that picked up just eight out of 40.

Akhilesh restricted the number of Yadav candidates to just five that included himself, his wife Dimple and cousin Dharmendra. He also took the risk of giving tickets to just four Muslim candidates and put up a Hindu candidate in Moradabad, a Muslim bastion.

The SP also gave more tickets to non-Yadav Backwards and Dalits. Six candidates from the Pasi caste, as many from the Maurya caste and 11 to Dalits, including on general seats such as Faizabad helped it regain some of the backward vote bank that had slipped away to the BJP in 2014.