Everybody in Uttar Pradesh is gaining at the cost of the Bahujan Samaj Party. Samajwadi Party is surging ahead in Uttar Pradesh, leading in 95 seats of the 403 in fray. While BJP is second leading in 55 seats, the BSP and Congress-RLD are leading in 35 and 25 seats respectively.
‘Yuvraj’ Akhilesh Yadav seems to be ahead of Rahul in the race, having worked to shed the party’s ‘goonda raj’ image. Akhilesh Yadav, the young Samajwadi Party (SP) leader, may just have turned the electoral tide in Uttar Pradesh elections into a giant SP wave, something that his Congress counterpart Rahul Gandhi had hoped to do when he had chosen UP as his make-or-break battleground a few years back.
Akhilesh became a workaholic on one hand, crisscrossing the length and breadth of the state to galvanise the grassroot leaders and workers and to increase the support base, on the other hand came promises of free laptops to students on the eve of the 2012 Assembly polls.
In direct contrast to Rahul Gandhi's negative campaign pitch which harped on the injustice meted out to the state's people by not only its government but also by groups in Mumbai and other parts of Maharashtra, Akhilesh's 'free laptop' promise brought a whiff of the aspirational 'India' to UP's 'Bharat'. While the Congress talked about reservation for Muslims, Akhilesh talked about Urdu keyboards. Combined with this has been a steely resolve to deny tickets to candidates like DP Yadav whose 'criminal' image would have harmed the party, according to Akhilesh.
The Samajwadi Party has one thing to its advantage, it has a chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav. Rahul Gandhi's election campaing influenced in making Mayawathi's BSP to loose in elections making way to SP and BJP to gain.
Akhilesh Yadav son of Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav, is a Lok Sabha member for Kannauj in Uttar Pradesh. Akhilesh Yadav has a Bachelor of Engineering (BE) degree from Sri Jayachamarajendra College of Engineering, Mysore affiliated to University of Mysore. He also has a Masters in environmental engineering from Sydney University.
The ruling BSP in UP has contested all 403 seats, SP 402, BJP 398 and RLD 46. Exit polls have predicted a hung assembly in the state with the SP cornering the major chunk of seats.
In the last assembly election, the BSP had won 206 seats and got a majority on its own, surprising political pundits. SP had got 97 seats, BJP 50 and RLD, which contested in alliance with the BJP won 10 seats. Independents and others got 17 seats.
