Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav on Sunday asked his partymen to be prepared for the polls which could be announced any time.
LUCKNOW: With the stand-off on the nuclear deal between the UPA and Left raising the prospects of an early Lok Sabha election, Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav on Sunday asked his partymen to be prepared for the polls which could be announced any time.
"There is a political crisis at the Centre. You all should be prepared for the Lok Sabha polls, which can be announced anytime," he said, addressing a meeting of district presidents and secretaries at the party headquarters here.
His remarks assume significance as the SP with 39 MPs could play a crucial role in saving both the nuclear deal and the UPA government if the Left parties withdraw support.
Earlier in the week, Mayawati's BSP with 17 MPs parted ways with the UPA while the Congress also suffered a jolt in Jammu and Kashmir where its junior coalition partner PDP pulled out.
Yadav said SP would be playing a crucial role in the formation of the next government at the Centre and no party was likely to get a majority in the coming general election.
He asked his partymen to take to the streets against the "faulty policies" of the BSP government and hold meetings at the district level to expose Chief Minister Mayawati who had quashed a government order of the previous SP regime in Uttar Pradesh giving SC status to 17 castes.
"The people should be apprised about the reality of the Mayawati government," Yadav said.
Meanwhile, senior Congress leader in the state Satya Prakash Malviya cautioned that a truck with the SP would be "suicidal" and demoralising for the party organisational set-up.
"The SP was discredited during its last tenure which led to its rout in the assembly elections. If the Congress agrees to a tie-up with the party for the Lok Sabha polls, it will send a wrong message," Malviya, who is an AICC member, said in Allahabad.
He said the party's organisational set up would be "demoralised" by an electoral alliance or adjustment of seats and advised it to go it alone.
"The electoral results may not be spectacular for the Congress if it chooses to go it alone but it will strengthen the organisation in the long run. And this is what the high command has been aiming at," said Malviya, whilc commenting on Yadavs statement that there were no permanent friends or enemies in politics.
He said the Congress needed to "draw the right lessons" from its experiment in neighbouring Bihar, where an alliance with Lalu Prasad's RJD has left the party "decimated".
"It needs to be remembered that in the 2004 general election, Lalu agreed to leave only five out of 41 seats for the Congress, of which we managed to win only three. Nobody will disagree with me when I say that our tally would have been definitely better if we had mustered the courage to fight the polls on our own," Malaviya said.
The party's experiment of an electoral pact with the BSP a decade ago had also proved counter-productive, he said, adding "this is certainly not something a party wanting to revive itself would like to undergo".
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