As ‘UP ke ladke’ Rahul and Akhilesh reunite, a look back at their 2017 partnership that failed

Seven years after they joined forces, “UP ke ladke (boys of UP)” Akhilesh Yadav and Rahul Gandhi reunited again in Agra on Sunday during the Congress’s Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra. Flanked by Rahul and Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, the presence of Samajwadi Party (SP) president at the event brought back memories of 2017 when they campaigned from an improvised vehicle, the Uttar Pradesh Vijay Rath, for the Assembly polls.

While both leaders and their parties will be hoping that a repeat of 2017 is not on the cards — the drubbing the alliance received marked the beginning of the rule of the Yogi Adityanath government — the sequence of events leading up to the announcement of the alliance on Friday has been quite similar. In the 2017 Assembly polls, the SP won only 47 seats, a drastic fall from the 224 it won when it stormed to power in 2012, while the Congress’s tally dropped from 28 in 2012 to seven. Despite being in an alliance, both parties fielded candidates against each other in 22 seats.

In both instances, alliance talks were initiated barely months before the elections and were on the verge of collapse before senior leaders of both parties intervened and salvaged them.

In 2017, uneasiness prevailed between the SP and the Congress as the latter demanded 110 seats while Akhilesh’s party offered 100. The alliance finally took shape only after senior Congress leaders such as Sonia Gandhi, Ghulam Nabi Azad (he was then in the party), and Priyanka met Akhilesh and senior SP leader Azam Khan. Following the meeting, it was announced that the SP would contest 298 seats while the Congress fielded candidates in 105 constituencies. Days after the announcement, the SP released a list of 208 candidates while fielding