Rashtriya Lok Dal Team Leader Jayant Singh Chaudhary shares a photo with Akhilesh Yadav, Alliance Sealed

An official announcement about the SP and RLD alliance could be made later this month.

Uttar Pradesh:

RLD President Jayant Singh Chaudhary told NDTV today that a pre-poll coalition between Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) and Samajwadi Party (SP) has been confirmed. Earlier in the evening, he tweeted a photo with SP director Akhilesh Yadav hinting that an official announcement could be made soon. Mr Chaudhary tweeted a photo of himself with Akhilesh Yadav with the words “Badhte Kadam (steps up)” this evening on the microblogging platform.

The RLD head had previously said that a decision could be expected later this month. “At the end of this month, we (RLD and Samajwadi Party) will make a decision and will come together,” the head of the RLD recently told ANI news agency.

The two parties have contested the council and voted for the Lok Sabha against each other since 2017. An alliance between the two parties aims to consolidate Muslim and Jat votes in key UP seats in the west. Relations between the two communities became strained after community violence in Muzaffarnagar in 2013, which experts say gave the BJP a lead in the region.

In the 2017 National Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, Bharatiya Janata Party won 312 seats out of 403 seats of the 403-seat Uttar Pradesh Assembly while Samajwadi Party (SP) won 47 seats, Bahujan Samajwadi Party (BSP) won 19 seats and Congress could only win seven seats. The remaining seats are all picked up by other candidates.