Swaraj India Chief Yogendra Yadav on Friday said his party won’t be part of any grand alliance, or ‘mahagathbandhan’, of opposition parties for the upcoming 2019 Lok Sabha polls as such a proposed alliance is no alternative to the BJP-led administration.
Yadav said Farm distress and unemployment will be key issues in the next polls and termed the Narendra Modi led government as “anti-farmer”.
Yadav said “farmers’ anger” ousted the BJP from power in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan. “Mahagathbandhan (grand alliance) is not an alternative at all to the present dispensation and it has not posed even a single issue so far. It has no policy frame, no vision and no dream at all,” Yadav said.
Yadav while interacting with media persons at an event in the Mumbai Press Club said, “That’s the reason We (Swaraj India) will not be a part of an alliance”.
He said the upcoming Lok Sabha elections will be fought on the plank of farm distress, an issue which caused the BJP’s debacle in the three Hindi-Heartland states. It was “farmers anger” that unseated the BJP government in the three states, the Swaraj India leader said.
Yadav added, In my view, BJP would have an edge on 150-200 seats and “if you think it can get closure to 250, then I don’t find any path forward to it”. BJP in the 2014 General Elections stormed to the power by winning 282 seats out of 543 in Lok Sabha.
Yadav said the next important election issue will be unemployment. “If the Manmohan Singh government was of jobless growth, then the Modi-led government has been of job-lost growth,” he said, adding this is why a big portion of youths have lost faith in the BJP-led government.
The former Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader said, In m my view, “In Chhattisgarh, Congress posted itself as an alternative because of its promise of a loan waiver and higher MSP for paddy and thus connected with farmer issues”.
Yogendra Yadav who was in Maharashtra launched his party’s nationwide initiative, “ICan19”, which he said, aims to encourage ordinary citizens to intervene in electoral politics.
“This Indian Citizens’ Action for Nation, 2019 (ICan) is like a national election duty for Indians through which one can contribute meaningfully in giving a new direction to the nation’s politics,” he added.