The Congress’s “hand” and the Rashtriya Lok Dal’s (RLD) “hand pump”, who had contested the UP elections as allies, failed to work together, allowing the BSP to make inroads into the “jatland” for the first time.
The RLD suffered serious setbacks on the home turf of their chief and Union Civil Aviation Minister Ajit Singh, when the BSP managed to win two seats in his Lok Sabha constituency Baghpat.
The leader of the RLD legislator party in the outgoing Assembly Kokab Hameed , a five time MLA, not only lost the Baghpat Assembly seat but came in at fourth place.
The RLD, which had nominated candidates for 46 Assembly seats, mainly in the western UP region, had hoped to forge a “Muslim-Jat” combination and was expecting an electoral windfall, but the results shattered that dream. The RLD was only able to bag nine of the 46 seats, one less than what it had secured in the 2007 Assembly polls.
Many senior leaders of the RLD bit the dust in the polls. State RLD unit president Baba Hardeo Singh finished fourth at Etmadpur seat in Agra district.
Similarly former minister Babu Lal was relegated to third position at Fatehpur Sikri seat.
Former ministers Haji Yaquoob Qureshi, Swami Omvesh, Yashveer Singh and Kiranpal Singh also lost the polls by hefty margins.
Ajit Singh’s son and party MP Jayant Chaudhary barely scraped through from the Mata seat in Mathura district after trailing till the last but one round.
The Congress also failed to gain from the alliance as the Muslims did not vote for the party at several seats where they were a dominant force.
The Congress had fared very badly in the western region in the last Assembly polls. Only three of its nominees managed to win from this region.
Leaders of the two parties attribute the failure to the delay in the alliance.
“The alliance was stitched barely a few days before the polls and it failed to percolate down to the grass root level,” said a senior RLD leader.
“The alliance should have been announced much earlier..there was a state of confusion in the workers at the ground level...a lot of time had been wasted,” he remarked.