‘Will attend Rahul’s yatra in Agra,' declares Akhilesh day after SP-Congress seat pact announced
The Congress leader's Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra will be in Agra on Sunday.
A day after Samajwadi Party (SP) and Congress sealed their seat-sharing deal in Uttar Pradesh for the forthcoming Lok Sabha election, SP chief Akhilesh Yadav on Thursday declared that he will attend Congress leader Rahul Gandhi's Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra in Agra on February 25.
Also Read: Congress keeps Raebareli, Amethi, Varanasi in 17-seat deal with Akhilesh Yadav
“I will attend the yatra. They will release soon a detailed programme. Once they share details of their Agra programme, I will go,” he said.
Earlier too, the former Uttar Pradesh chief minister was invited by the Congress to accompany Rahul, in the grand old party's earlier bastions of Amethi and Raebareli. However, with seat-sharing talks between the two sides going nowhere, Yadav, skipped the Gandhi-led march, which entered Uttar Pradesh on February 16 from the neighbouring Bihar.
However, a call from Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, Rahul's sister, led to the seat pact being finalised. Under the agreement, Congress will field candidates on 17 out of the state's 80 seats, and the SP will take the remaining 63 seats.
Also Read: A phone call from Priyanka, Akhilesh's ‘all’s well' and Cong accepts 17 seats
Besides Amethi and Raebareli, the grand old party will field candidates in Fatehpur Sikri, Amroha, Saharanpur, Prayagraj, Maharajganj, Varanasi, Bulandshahr, Jhansi, Ghaziabad, Mathura, Sitapur, Barabanki, Kanpur, Bansgaon, and Deoria.
Uttar Pradesh, the country's most populous state, has 80 seats – the highest – in the 543-member Lok Sabha. Of these, the Congress currently holds only Raebareli, which was won by Sonia Gandhi, Rahul and Priyanka's mother. Sonia Gandhi, however, has now entered Parliament via the Rajya Sabha, with Priyanka being the frontrunner to make her electoral debut from her mother's erstwhile constituency.