Lok Sabha polls 2024: Samajwadi Party names 16 candidates; Akhilesh Yadav's wife Dimple Yadav to fight from Mainpuri

The Samajwadi Party on Tuesday sounded the bugle of Lok Sabha elections 2024 as they released the list of candidates for 16 seats in Uttar Pradesh. The list includes the name of Dimple Yadav, the wife of SP's chief Akhilesh Yadav, who will contest the general elections from her current seat of Mainpuri.

The other candidates on the list include Shafiqur Rahman Barq from Sambhal, Ravidas Mehrotra from Lucknow, Akshay Yadav from Firozabad, from Etah, Dharmendra Yadav from Budaun, Utkarsh Verma from Kheri, Anand Bhadauria from Dhaurahra, Anu Tandon from Unnao, Naval Kishore from Farrukhabad, Rajaram Pal from Akbarpur, Shivshankar Singh Patel from Banda, Awadhesh Prasad from Faizabad, Lalji Verma from Ambedkar Nagar, Ramprasad Chaudhary from Basti, and Kajal Nishad from Gorakhpur.

The development is significant since Akhilesh Yadav's is part of the Opposition INDIA bloc and has been negotiating the seat-sharing arrangements with the Congress.

Uttar Pradesh is the most crucial state for the and the good performance of the BJP in this state is one of the major reasons for their dominance at the national level. In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, BJP won 62 seats out of the total 80 while a pre-poll alliance between SP, BSP, and RLD managed to get just 15 seats.

won just 1 seat in that election during which it lost some of its major bastions in Uttar Pradesh.

Recently, Akhilesh Yadav has signaled some breakthrough in the seat-sharing talks with Congress as he said that the Samajwadi Party is ready to give 11 seats to Congress. The grand-old party has been demanding 20 seats in Uttar Pradesh, which looks like a long-shot considering their performances in the general and in the state.

The Mayawati's BSP has cleared that they will go