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Updated: Jun 04, 2019 23:51 IST

The grand alliance between regional rivals-turned-friends Samajwadi Party (SP) and Bahujan Samaj Party (BJP) was suspended on Tuesday, but both sides left the door open for a future tie-up in a move that all but ended a coalition once considered the biggest electoral hurdle for a second National Democratic Alliance (NDA) term but failed to live up to its game-changer billing in the 2019 general election.

At a press conference in Delhi, Mayawati said her party will fight 11 upcoming assembly bypolls on its own, blaming the SP for poor vote transfer and cadre indiscipline and saying it was not politically expedient to continue the alliance.

Hours later, SP chief Akhilesh Yadav said if the alliance ended, SP will field its nominees on all 11 seats. “Even if our paths are different, we welcome it,” he said. But both leaders steered clear of any personal bitterness with Mayawati even praising Yadav and saying her personal equation with him was not affected by the electoral debacle.

Eleven assembly seats fell vacant after sitting MLAs were elected as MPs. The BJP holds 10 of these seats and the SP one.

The announcement came roughly two weeks after the coalition partners won just 15 of UP’s 80 Lok Sabha seats, far behind the Bharatiya Janata Party’s tally of 62. The clutch of bypolls also represent the first electoral test in India’s most populous state after the general elections and fighting it is an unusual step for the BSP that normally doesn’t contest by-elections.

The 63-year-old Mayawati said the possibility of an SP-BSP alliance was open in the future but that there was a need for a reform in the way the SP cadre worked. On Monday, while asking party workers to get ready for the bypolls on their own strength, Mayawati had complained that the SP failed to transfer its voter base to BSP candidates in the general election.

“If the SP chief succeeds in reforming his party, the BSP will consider entering into an alliance with it again, else it will be better to go it alone in the election. The SP will take time in bringing required changes in the cadre. In such a scenario, the BSP has decided to contest the upcoming bypoll on its own strength,” she added on Tuesday.

Responding to her statement, Yadav said getting justice for a slain party worker in Ghazipur was more important.

“The alliance is not important for us at this moment. Ensuring that party workers who were killed recently get justice is more important . Elections will keep taking place as per schedule in the future also. But will [SP district panchayat member] Vijay Yadav ever come back, will district panchayat member [Lalji Yadav], who was killed in Jaunpur, ever be back,” he asked reporters. Vijay was killed on May 23 while Lalji was murdered last Friday.

This is the second successive alliance forged by Yadav that has failed electorally. In the 2017 assembly election, he tied up with the Congress only to see the BJP storm to power with a two-thirds majority in the 403-member House.

In January, Mayawati and Yadav buried two decades of acrimony to take on the BJP. The tie-up was considered formidable because it, at least theoretically, brought together three big vote blocs — Yadavs, Jatavs and Muslims — who together constitute at least 35% of the state. Candidates put up by a united Opposition managed to beat BJP nominees in three key by-elections in 2018: Gorakhpur, Phulpur and Kairana.

The combined vote share of the SP and the BSP was higher than the BJP in at least 41 of the state’s 80 Lok Sabha seats, according to 2014 election figures. The addition of the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD), which considered the Jat community as its core base in western UP, was expected to add to the coalition’s strength, and pose a stiff challenge to the BJP.

But the BJP managed to consolidate the Hindu votes across castes, targeted non-Yadav Other Backward Classes (OBC) and non-Jatav Dalits, and utilised the personal appeal of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to raid the Opposition’s vote bank.

The BSP, which fought 38 seats, won 10, up from zero in 2014. The SP fared worse, failing to improve on its 2014 tally of five and failing to win three family pocket boroughs of Kannauj, Firozabad and Badaun — a fact underlined by Mayawati on Monday. The RLD couldn’t open its account.

Experts have said that poor vote transfer, inadequate coordination at the grassroots level between party workers who were traditional rivals for years, and social contradictions among the party’s core vote base — the Yadavs, for example, are seen as the oppressor by a number of Dalit castes across UP — were responsible for the drubbing.

“While analysing the reasons of defeat, we found the SP needs to reform its cadre, make them disciplined and hardworking… Akhilesh Yadav will have to instil missionary zeal in them similar to the one existing in the BSP,” Mayawati said.

She praised Yadav and his wife Dimple. “They gave immense respect to me during the election campaign. I also respect them like my family-members forgetting the bitter relationship with SP leaders in the past. My relations with SP chief is not for vested political interests but it will continue through thick and thin. Our relationship will never end,” she said. “But political compulsions cannot be ignored. The results of the Lok Sabha election clearly show that Yadavs did not support the SP.”

“BSP contested the Lok Sabha election in alliance with the SP for the larger interest of the people but we failed to get desired results,” she added.

The BJP called the alliance unprincipled and said it was always bound to collapse. “The people of UP have completely rejected this alliance and gave it a result that leads to its collapse. It was an alliance of convenience and compulsion which was crafted to prevent Modi ji from becoming PM again,” BJP spokesperson GVL Narasimha Rao told ANI.

Communist Party of India (Marxist) politburo member Mohammed Salim said, “We have always maintained that if any party wants a long-term alliance, it has to be an issue-based pact for the people. But what the SP and BSP had entered into was nothing but a poll pact. BSP has broken the pact as the results were not good. If it had been otherwise, the pact would have continued.” Saugata Ray of the Trinamool Congress called it an internal matter of the two parties. “These things won’t have any impact on Opposition unity. we will fight together against the BJP on the floor of the House.”