Gathbandhan nahi hota to Samajwadi ki sarkar banti

LUCKNOW: Samajwadi Party patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav on Sunday blamed the alliance with the Congress for its humiliating defeat in the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections.(SP would have formed the government on its own if it had not entered into an alliance),” he told reporters. This is not the first time that Mulayam has openly expressed his reservations over SP-Congress alliance A day after the pact was announced amid much fanfare at a joint press conference by Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi and SP chief Akhilesh Yadav in Lucknow, Mulayam had termed it as a wrong move and refused to endorse it. But Akhilesh went ahead with it.Stating that the alliance had harmed SP in the elections, Mulayam said there was no need for the party to have entered into an alliance when it had contested the 2012 polls independently and was voted to power.However, talking to media in Saifai, Mulayam said one person cannot be held responsible for the party’s poor performance and there were hosts of reasons that led to the debacle. He said the BJP managed to convince the people about the promises it made during the elections. “It is now for the BJP to live up to the promises it has made to the people of UP,” he said.Earlier in the day, Mulayam held a closed door meeting with son Akhilesh at Janeshwar Misra Trust office to analyse reasons for the defeat. This was MSY’s first-ever visit to Janeshwar Trust office that came into being almost a year ago and housed party’s war room in the polls.Akhilesh Yadav has convened a meeting of the newly elected party MLAs at the party headquarters in Lucknow on March 16 where the party is likely to finalise the leader of opposition, a post which has been held by both, Shivpal Yadav and Azam Khan , on earlier occasions.