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HT Exclusive: 'Add one to 180', says Akhilesh Yadav on ally Congress's seat demand for UP assembly polls
Asked if the Grand Old Party had asked for 200, Yadav said: “Slightly less than that”. Asked if they had sought 180, he said: “Add one to 180”.
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The Congress is seeking 181 of the 403 assembly seats ahead of the Uttar Pradesh (UP) elections due early next year, the party’s ally and Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Akhilesh Yadav said on Saturday. Yadav said the SP has decided how many seats it will contest and underlined that the goal is to defeat the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
“Rule and reality will change in UP,” he said at the HT Leadership Summit 2026, alluding to the summit’s theme of “New Rules. New Realities”. Track the HTLS 2026 session live here
He emphasised the "very good" relationship with the Congress when asked how many seats it has asked to fight on, and whether it was 100. "The number of seats they have asked for is higher than what you are suggesting."
Asked whether the Congress had asked for 200, Yadav said it was slightly less. “Add one to 180,” he said when asked if the Congress had sought 180.
The Congress's performance in the 2024 national polls in alliance with the SP raised hopes of its recovery from a terminal decline in Uttar Pradesh. Congress has been out of power in the state since 1989.
The Congress-SP alliance outperformed the BJP in 2024. It won 43 of the 80 Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh and polled 43.52% of the votes. The Congress bagged six of the 17 seats it contested and secured 9.46% of the votes. The BJP's seats fell from 62 in 2019 to 33, dropping its overall tally below the majority mark in Parliament for the first time since 2014.
The Congress contested the 2022 Uttar Pradesh polls on its own but could win just two seats, faring worse than its seven-seat show in 2017. The SP won 111 seats in 2022.
The assembly elections are due in early 2027, and the SP has announced it will release its "Jan-Man Manifesto" on November 26, coinciding with Constitution Day.
The 2027 contest is shaping up primarily between the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance and the SP-led Opposition.
Yadav refused to comment on the erosion of the Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP)'s support base. “I do not want to comment on any particular political party. Let us talk about the community instead."
The BSP's lone lawmaker in the Uttar Pradesh assembly died in August, and the party has no seats in Parliament.
Yadav accused the BJP of misleading not just certain communities, but the entire country. "...the consequences are now visible.”
Yadav cited setbacks the BJP faced in the 2026 legislative council polls and the 2024 national polls and called them significant. "When the [BJP] government was formed [at the Centre in 2014], Uttar Pradesh played a major role in bringing it to power. ...Even when the government was formed again in 2019, Uttar Pradesh played a decisive role. And today, when the BJP has lost ground in Uttar Pradesh, the government at the Centre is an alliance government. It is not a BJP government on its own.”
In the legislative council elections, the BJP won six of the 11 graduate and teacher constituency seats. The SP won five, up from three in 2020, including both in Varanasi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s parliamentary constituency. The BJP lost Lucknow graduates, Agra teachers and Allahabad-Jhansi graduates to the SP.
Yadav said the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP)’s protests were against the BJP. He added that the protests started with the NEET paper leak after middle- and lower-class students saw how the government was playing with their future. “It was not a youth movement only; they had the support of their parents. The SP has always been with the youth and for the youth. Gen Z wants clarity, not fake promises.”
