News

Western UP has 140 Assembly seats spread over 26 districts which will vote in first two phases With the Samajwadi Party-Congress alliance going strong after initial hiccups, Bahujan Samaj Party and Bharatiya Janata Party have been forced to rework their strategies in the western belt of   UP Assembly Elections 2017   where Muslim voters are a major force to reckon with. Western UP has 140 Assembly constituencies spread over 26 districts which will go to polls in the first two phases on February 11 and 15. BSP, which was expecting a cake walk in the wake of feud in the Yadav family, to provide a strong alternative to BJP, got a blow with the coming together of two young faces of Indian politics - Akhilesh and Rahul - who do not have any previous record of hobnobbing with the saffron party. To win over Muslims, BSP fielded has fielded as many as 50 Muslim candidates in the first two phases as it felt that Muslim vote along with its own core Dalit vote bank would see ...

Walking out of the shadow of his father and uncle and with the support of Congress and Nitish Kumar, Akhilesh Yadav could be bad news for the BJP The split in the   Samajwadi Party   (SP), which increasingly looks imminent, is bad news for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), not just for the 2017 Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls but also for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. With the Congress weakened, the BJP effort has been to dent the support base as well as credibility of regional political parties that have the potential to form the nucleus of a strong third front in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. These parties are Uttar Pradesh-based SP and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP); Naveen Patnaik-led Biju Janata Dal (BJD) in Odisha; the Dravidian parties of Tamil Nadu; the Nitish Kumar-Lalu Prasad   Akhilesh Yadav   combine in Bihar, Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress in Bengal and the Left parties. The states where these parties wield influence – Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Benga...