UP Elections 2017: Samajwadi Minister Questions Tie-up With Congress Ahead Of Vote Count

Cracks appeared in the ruling Samajwadi Party ahead of the Saturday vote count for the crucial state assembly elections, as a senior minister questioned the benefits of aligning with the Congress.

Senior Samajwadi leader and a minister in the Akhilesh Yadav cabinet, Ravidas Mehrotra, while questioning the SP-Congress alliance, said the SP would have won on its own and there was no need for this tie-up with the Congress. He also said that in the final outcome the Congress would have gained from the alliance and not the Samajwadi Party.

While senior party leaders and workers have been questioning the tie-up right since beginning, it had so far been in private. Mehrotra is the first to have expressed his feelings openly in public.

In a related development, Urban Development Minister Mohd Adam Khan, said in case the SP lost at the hustings, the blame would not be of Akhilesh Yadav alone.

"Khuda na kare aisi naubat aaye, gar aisa hua to iski zimmedari sabki hoga aur ye nuksaan poore pradesh ka hoga (God forbid that such a result happens then the responsibility should be shared by all)," he said.

He also said that Mulayam Singh Yadav's wife Sadhna Gupta's statement that "Akhilesh should not have humiliated his father" in a recent interview "could have been avoided".

SP contested the assembly elections in alliance with the Congress which was given 105 seats and the remaining 298 were contested by it. Voting for the 403 seats of the UP assembly will be counted at 75 counting centres in the state from 8am on Saturday.