Naidu is keen to enrol BSP into the 'Third Front', known as UNPA to fill the gap left by the departure of Mulayam Singh Yadav's Samajwadi Party recently to join hands with the UPA.
Mayawati charged that the communal atmosphere in the state had been spoilt because of an understanding between the SP and the BJP.
Mayawati, who has raised the pitch for the dismissal of the 41-month-old government, described the move as a mark of protest against the speaker's continued recognition of the BSP's 37 defectors as members of the ruling Samajwadi Party.
Pitted against Samajwadi Party's nominee actor Sanjay Dutt and Bahujan Samaj Party's Akhilesh Das, the Bharatiya Janata Party candidate from Lucknow Lalji Tandon on Wednesday said the character of the city is very different as none of the film stars or businessmen has ever been able to find success in this Lok Sabha seat.
It is speculated that Scindia, known to be very close to Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, met the legislators in a bid to feel their pulses in the wake of developments in Karnataka and Goa.
The occasion, which brought Yadav, a former chief minister, and the Bahujan Samaj Party supremo together was a meeting convened to finalise nominees for the State Human Rights Commission. The arch rivals had parted ways following the collapse of their coalition government in 1995 and have been bitter critics attacking each other and rarely acknowledging even the presence of the other at public functions.
In a dramatic development in Lucknow on Wednesday, Samajwadi Party legislator Kazim Ali Khan resigned to join the ruling BSP, while Ram Sewak Singh, the lone newly-elected MLA belonging to Uma Bharti's BJP switched loyalties to the ruling party.
While reserving the verdict, the Bench also comprising Justices H K Sema, A R Lakshmanan, P K Balasubramaniyan and D K Jain, asked the contesting parties to file written submissions by Friday.
Neeraj Shekhar won the prestigious Ballia Lok Sabha by-election by a margin of over 1,30,000 votes over his nearest rival, Bahujan Samaj Party's Vinay Shankar Tewari.
The Samajwadi Party on Tuesday suffered a major setback when it lost the prestigious Firozabad Lok Sabha seat, with party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav's daughter-in-law losing to actor-turned-politician Raj Babbar of the Congress, by a huge margin of over 85,000 votes. Babbar, a former Member of Parliament from Agra who rebelled against the SP and joined the Congress before the Lok Sabha elections in May, secured 3,12,728 votes while Dimple Yadav got 2,27,385 votes.
SP leaders could be behind the sting operation: Mayawati
The Uttar Pradesh Congress on Thursday morning handed over a letter to Governor T V Rajeswar withdrawing support to the three-year-old Mulayam Singh Yadav government.
The SP's bid to dent the BJP's formidable social equation is playing out in a big way in the Poorvanchal or eastern region of Uttar Pradesh as the ruling party is working overtime to keep its caste equation unharmed.
Those disqualified by Speaker Somnath Chatterjee are Bhalchandra Yadav (Khalilabad), Ramakant Yadav (Azamgarh) and Mohammad Shahid Akhlaque and their seats in the House have been declared vacant. Petitions for their disqualification were filed by the BSP under the Tenth Schedule of the Constitution (anti-defection law) on the ground that the three MPs had voluntarily given up the membership of their party and joined the Samajwadi Party.
Reaching out to the ruling party in Uttar Pradesh, which has 17 MPs in the Lok Sabha, Communist Party of India-Marxist General Secretary Prakash Karat drove to the Uttar Pradesh chief minister's residence in New Delhi to hold the first meeting after the Left parties withdrew support to the United Progressive Alliance government over the nuclear deal.
"He is the only secular leader of our country who has worked with Mahatma Gandhi, Jai Prakash Narain and Ram Manohar Lohia, and he is the only leader who can save the nation and its people in the coming years," the SP's Assam unit general secretary Ratul Kumar Choudhury said.
The first and the foremost achievement of the Mayawati government has been creating a perception of putting an end to much-maligned 'transfer-posting' industry.
Despite being arch detractors on the home turf of Uttar Pradesh, Mulayam Singh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party and Dara Singh Chauhan of the Bahujan Samaj Party will have to sit next to each other in the first row in the Lok Sabha.
The party, which gained the most in the polls, was the Bahujan Samaj Party.
Former Bharatiya Janata Party leader Swami Prasad Maurya on Wednesday said he was not going back to the saffron camp and indicated joining Samajwadi Party on Friday.
Shahid Siddiqui, who defected from the Samajwadi Party, sang a different tune two days ago when he defended the nuclear deal in an exclusive interview with rediff.com
Flaying the Mayawati government's decision to dedicate schemes worth Rs 7000 crore to the Bahujan Samaj Party founder Kanshi Ram, Samajwadi Party on Wednesday questioned the late Dalit leader's contribution to Uttar Pradesh and termed it as an attempt to 'Kanshimarise' state capital Lucknow.
According to the results announced on Thursday, 25 Samajwadi Party candidates were defeated by less than 5,000 votes while a similar fate awaited three nominees of the Rashtriya Lok Dal.
"Mayawati had sent offers to me to join BSP and threatened that otherwise I will be left doing rounds of courts and made to languish in jail," he told reporters in Lucknow. The SP general secretary also alleged that independent MLA Mukhtar Ansari, accused in Bharatiya Janata Party MLA Krishnand Rai murder case, and BSP MP Akbar Ahmad Dampi conspired to kill him during the recently-held Lok Sabha bypolls in UP.
Mulayam's cousimn and senior Samajwadi Party leader Ram Gopal Yadav's son Akshay is all set to take the electoral plunge in Ferozabad. However, he faces really tough competition from BJP's S P Singh Baghel. Renu Mittal reports.
The bypolls are termed as a 'rehearsal' for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls by CM Yogi Adityanath.
The order is is contrary to the Central Information Commission's directive bringing six national parties under the transparency law.
"I have already floated this idea to Congress chief Sonia Gandhi and Jan Morcha patron V P Singh and now the ball is in their court," Paswan, also the Union Steel and Fertilizers Minister, told reporters in Lucknow.
She launched a frontal attack on her arch rival, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav, and left no stone unturned to woo the state's 17 per cent Muslim electorate.
Consensus continued to elude the Women's Reservation Bill which is unlikely to see the light of the day during the current session of Parliament.
BSP leader Swami Prasad Maurya earlier alleged in the Assembly that an SP MP from Allahabad was involved in the incident and demanded a CBI inquiry into the matter.
I was not ready to spend money and they demanded money. I don't want to use money in politics. Unfortunately in the BSP, money has become everything. There is a mafia working in the party that controls everything.
OBC leader Dharam Singh Saini on Thursday became the third minister to resign from the Uttar Pradesh cabinet this week, giving yet another jolt to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party in the run-up to the assembly polls.
Of the 143 candidates contesting in the first phase of Chhattisgarh assembly elections, 15 candidates have criminal cases registered against them.
However, two Bahujan Samaj Party and one Samajwadi Party MLA who support the government skipped the CLP meeting, he added.
Akhilesh Yadav has instructed party MLAs to vote for opposition candidate Meira Kumar, SP patron Mulayam Singh Yadav and his brother Shivpal Yadav might go in favour of NDA's nominee Ram Nath Kovind.
Akhilesh said that the defeat of the Dalit candidate would cement his party's relations with Mayawati-led BSP.
The BJP leader linked his claim to the beginning of construction of a Ram temple in Ayodhya following a Supreme Court judgment, and the abrogation of special status to Jammu and Kashmir under Article 370 of the Constitution.
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