A customised campaign bus arrived at the SP office in Lucknow on Wednesday for the proposed ‘PDA Rath Yatra’ themed around the party’s formula of consolidating backward, Dalit, and Muslim, or pichhda, Dalit and alpsankhyak voters. Opposition Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Akhilesh Yadav is expected to begin a statewide campaign in the last week of October ahead of the 2027 Uttar Pradesh assembly elections.
The formula helped SP register its best performance, bagging 37 of 80 Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh in the 2024 national polls. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s seats in the state fell from 62 in 2019 to 33, as the party’s overall tally dropped below the majority mark in Parliament for the first time since 2014. SP’s ally Congress increased its count to six seats from one in 2024. The BJP seeks to retain power in Uttar Pradesh and maintain its winning streak after the electoral setback in the 2024 national polls. Despite electoral setbacks since 2014, SP has increased its vote share since 2017. In the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, the SP-Congress alliance was ahead in 224 of 403 assembly segments. The BJP polled 38.30 million votes and SP 38.16 million. In the 2022 assembly polls, the BJP and SP polled 41.3 and 32.1% of the vote. After the 2024 polls, SP intensified its PDA campaign, with Yadav describing the 2027 election as a contest between the BJP and PDA.
