The Samajwadi Party said on Sunday that it expects to spring a surprise in the forthcoming by-elections to 12 assembly seats in Uttar Pradesh and to win the bulk of them, weeks after its alliance with the Bahujan Samaj Party fell apart following a poor Lok Sabha result.

The SP’s claim

Former state minister Arvind Singh Gope said party workers had already finished booth-level preparation in most places. He compared the coming contests with earlier by-elections in the Phulpur, Gorakhpur and Kairana parliamentary seats and the Noorpur assembly seat, and predicted the SP would take most of the seats. He said the bypolls would set the “tone for the 2022 UP assembly elections” and that the party aimed to reach every voter down to the village level.

Asked about the end of the alliance, Gope said the SP had lost nothing from the split, describing Akhilesh Yadav as large-hearted and saying it was the BSP that had walked away. He called the tie-up a major experiment and said not every experiment succeeds.

Background

The SP and BSP announced their partnership in January, contesting 38 seats each and leaving the Congress out. The alliance won only 15 of Uttar Pradesh’s 80 seats, after which the BSP ended it. With the parties now going separately, the bypolls are expected to see a four-cornered fight, unlike the largely triangular contests of this year’s Lok Sabha polls and the 2017 assembly election, which the SP fought together with the Congress. In 2014 the BJP, Congress, SP, BSP and RLD all contested the state’s parliamentary seats on their own.

Eleven of the seats fell vacant because their MLAs were elected to the Lok Sabha: Balha, Gangoh, Govindnagar, Iglas, Jalalpur, Lucknow Cantonment, Manikpur, Pratapgarh, Rampur, Tundla and Zaidpur. Of these, Balha, Iglas, Tundla and Zaidpur are reserved for Scheduled Castes. The twelfth, Hamirpur, became vacant after BJP legislator Ashok Kumar Singh Chandel was disqualified following his conviction in a murder case.

The BJP’s response

State BJP media coordinator Rakesh Tripathi said his party would come out strongest whether the contest was four-cornered or wider, adding that it had learnt from earlier bypoll defeats and had already begun preparing. He said the BJP hoped to raise its tally in the assembly by winning Rampur and Jalalpur, which it lost in 2017.

See also: Samajwadi Party | Uttar Pradesh MLAs

Originally published on 15 July 2019. Rewritten on 9 October 2026.

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