For the first time since the 2017 elections, the Samajwadi Party, led by Akhilesh Yadav, has tasted success. After losing badly in two consecutive assembly elections and one Lok Sabha election, the party now appears to be making a remarkable comeback, securing 37 seats in Uttar Pradesh.

In 2019, the Samajwadi Party won only 5 seats in the country’s largest state. The BJP, on the other hand, is leading on only 32 seats in the state against its mammoth target of 70. The BJP had won 62 seats out of the total 80 in the 2019 general election.

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Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav has been campaigning with his PDA (Backward, Dalit and Minority) slogan in this election. Interestingly, this marks the SP’s most impressive performance in Lok Sabha elections after Mulayam Singh Yadav’s demise.

The manner in which Akhilesh Yadav incorporated caste equations into this election seems to have weakened the BJP’s electoral calculations. The 1973-born Akhilesh Yadav has demonstrated a remarkable ability to rally support and mobilise his party’s cadre, thereby playing a crucial role in shaping the regional and national political dynamics.

Watching the trend, it seems that the Bahujan Samaj Party’s vote bank also went in favour of the Congress and the SP.

The SP-Congress combine is projected to win 39 seats, while the BJP has 40 seats in its kitty.

Akhilesh is leading by a margin of around 1,70,076 votes in the Kannauj constituency ahead of BJP’s Subrat Pathak.

He has won from the Kannauj constituency — which was also represented by his father, Mulayam Singh Yadav, before him — three times. He held this seat from 2000 to 2012 when he vacated it after becoming the chief minister.

Yadav Parivar’s association with Kannauj dates back to 1999 when the late Mulayam Singh Yadav won the seat. Since then, the seat has been held by a member of the family – either Akhilesh Yadav himself or his wife, Dimple Yadav – until 2019.

An SP bastion since 1998, the Kannauj Lok Sabha constituency was breached by the BJP in 2019, when Subrat Pathak won by a margin of about 12,000 votes, narrowly defeating Dimple Yadav, the wife of Akhilesh Yadav.

Today, Dimple Yadav won the Mainpuri seat by a huge margin of 2,21,639 votes, defeating BJP’s Jayveer Singh.

Akhilesh’s cousins Dharmendra Yadav and Akashaya Yadav, won from Azamgarh and Firozabad, respectively, while another party leader Aditya Yadav emerged victorious in Badaun.

After maintaining suspense, Akhilesh filed nomination from the seat at the last moment to reclaim SP’s strong areas from the BJP, which has made strong inroads in the past 10 years.

Yadav, who has been serving as the Leader of Opposition in the Uttar Pradesh Legislative Assembly since March 2022, obtained his bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the University of Mysore, Karnataka. He also holds a master’s degree in environmental engineering from the University of Sydney, Australia.

In Uttar Pradesh, the Samajwadi Party and the Congress sealed their pre-poll alliance for the Lok Sabha elections. As part of the pact, the Congress was offered 17 seats to contest in the state, while the remaining 63 went to the Samajwadi Party.