Congress Does A BJP, Plans Coalition With Smaller Parties For UP Polls

The Congress and Samajwadi Party - perpetually in an on again off again relationship - are now bickering over seat share in Uttar Pradesh. Reason - the Congress's ambition to stop playing second fiddle to Akhilesh Yadav's party and to stitch a rainbow coalition of smaller parties, taking a page out of the BJP handbook. Coalitions with smaller parties - mostly non-Yadav OBCs and Dalit-focused smaller parties -- in Uttar Pradesh have been the secret of the BJP's massive success in 2017 and 2022.  It provided the party the key to caste engineering that provided huge dividends. During the last election, the BJP had stitched together a coalition with smaller parties like the Nishad Party, Apna Dal (Sonelal) and a few others. It won 255 seats, which, while lower than its 2017 tally of 312, was still a massive majority.The Congress appears to have learnt its lesson well.