Samajwadi Party on Tuesday named 16 candidates for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections, with party chief Akhilesh Yadav’s wife Dimple Yadav to contest from her current Mainpuri seat. The party also fielded sitting MLAs Ravidas Mehrotra and Lalji Verma from Lucknow and Ambedkar Nagar, respectively.

93-year-old Shafiqur Rahman Barq has been fielded from Sambhal, the constituency he currently represents in Lok Sabha.

The candidates’ list includes Akshay Yadav from Firozabad, Devesh Shakya from Etah, Dharmendra Yadav from Budaun, Utkarsh Verma from Kheri, Anand Bhadauria from Dhaurahra, Anu Tandon from Unnao, Naval Kishore Shakya from Farrukhabad, Rajaram Pal from Akbarpur, Shivshankar Singh Patel from Banda, Awadhesh Prasad from Faizabad, Ramprasad Chaudhary from Basti, and Kajal Nishad from Gorakhpur.

The unilateral announcement by the Samajwadi Party, which is a key member of the opposition INDIA bloc Uttar Pradesh, comes days after Akhilesh Yadav’s cryptic social media post on seat-sharing discussions triggered strong speculation in political circles.

On Saturday, Yadav said his party’s alliance with the Congress is “off to a good start with 11 strong seats (to the Congress)”.

“This trend will move forward with the winning equation. ‘INDIA’ team and ‘PDA (backwards, Dalits, and minorities)’ strategy will change history,” he said in a post on X.

Uttar Pradesh has 80 Lok Sabha seats, the highest in the country. In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP and its ally Apna Dal (Sonelal) won 62 out of the 80 seats in the state. The Samajwadi Party-Bahujan Samaj Party alliance, which was expected to pose a challenge to the BJP, did not yield the desired results, winning just 15 seats (SP 5 and BSP 10) while the Congress could only bag one seat.