Following its recent victory in the Ghosi Assembly by-election, the Samajwadi Party (SP) is displaying renewed enthusiasm as it prepares for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections in Uttar Pradesh. The party’s leadership wants to ensure they maintain the momentum from the by-poll victory up until the elections slated for next year.
To do so, the party will be organising training camps; the next one, called the “Jagran Abhiyan Training Camp”, will be held on 5 and 6 October in Pratapgarh. This particular camp is crucial since Pratapgarh is the stronghold of Raghuraj Pratap Singh—also known as Raja Bhaiya—who is the president of the Jan Satta Dal and the MLA from Kunda.
The SP has been focusing its attention on training camps after chief Akhilesh Yadav’s uncle, Shivpal Yadav returned to a prominent role within the party. Additionally, the political atmosphere in the state has changed following the arrest of the SP’s Gulshan Yadav—a fact that the party leadership is keenly aware of. Notably, Yadav and Singh had contested against each other in Pratapgarh in 2022. The late SP supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav had shared a good working relationship with—the latter served as a minister in 2005 and 2012 in Mulayam Singh and Akhilesh’s respective cabinets. However, in the last election, the relationship between Akhilesh Yadav and Singh soured over certain statements and other issues
With Shivpal Yadav serving as the party’s general secretary, training camps have been organised in important regions including Gola Gokarnnath, Lakhimpur Kheri, Naimisharanya, Sitapur—where soft Hindutva was targeted—as well as Bundelkhand, Banda, Chitrakoot, and Fatehpur, to boost the morale of party workers. Another training camp was organized in Firozabad, where members of the Yadav family united publicly after several years.
The camps are being held in areas where the SP did not perform well in recent elections. In the 2022 Assembly elections, the party won one seat in Sitapur and faced total defeat in Lakhimpur Kheri. It did not make a significant impact in Bundelkhand either. Of these, Kaushambi and Pratapgarh will especially pose a challenge for the party. Of the seven assembly seats in Pratapgarh, five come under the Pratapgarh Lok Sabha constituency, and two come under the Kaushambi constituency. In the 2019 elections, the Samajwadi Party lost the Kaushambi seat by nearly 38,000 votes. In the Pratapgarh Lok Sabha seat, the last time the Samajwadi Party contested was as a part of the BSP-SP alliance, which resulted in significant defeat. Now that the alliance has separated, the Samajwadi Party will need to strategise effectively in these seats to contend against the Bharatiya Janata Party’s alliance.
The upcoming training camp in Pratapgarh will see leaders such as Shivpal Yadav, Naresh Uttam Patel, Indrajit Saroj and several others alongside party president Akhilesh. The aim here will be to gather feedback from party workers and formulate new strategies. Given the recent arrest of Gulshan Yadav, the SP will also try to unite the party, garner public sympathy, and challenge Singh’s dominance.
