Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Akhilesh Yadav and his party colleague Azam Khan on Tuesday resigned as the Lok Sabha members from Azamgarh and Rampur days after they were elected to the Uttar Pradesh assembly.
Yadav is likely to be elected as the SP legislative party leader on Saturday when a meeting of the newly-elected lawmakers will be held in Lucknow. He submitted his resignation to Lok Sabha speaker Om Birla days after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept back to power in Uttar Pradesh. SP leader and Rajya Sabha member Ramgopal Yadav accompanied him.
The decision to retain the assembly seats by these two leaders is a clear indication that the SP will continue to fight the BJP on its home turf.
The presence of Akhilesh Yadav and Azam Khan- whenever he is released from jail-in the state assembly is bound to give trouble to the ruling BJP.
A senior SP functionary told IANS, that the first priority of the party would be to retain Azamgarh and Rampur Lok Sabha seats when by-elections are held.
“Those who think that we are demoralised with the UP results are sadly mistaken. We are very much on the battlefield and will now fight with greater vigour,” he said.
Azam Khan has been slapped with a number of cases by the UP government on charges of land grab among others. He is in jail currently.
Yadav, fighting his first Assembly election, won by more than 60,000 votes from Karhal seat in Mainpuri – considered an SP bastion – getting almost double the votes of his nearest BJP rival, S P S Baghel.
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(With inputs from ANI)
