Watch: Samajwadi leader signals slap at district president, Akhilesh laughs

With the Uttar Pradesh
polls right around the corner, political tempers in India’s biggest state are running high. Politicians are running pillar-to-post conducting rallies and
trying to rake in votes in this high-voltage election that has been hailed as a
bellwether for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

It was during such
a high-pressure election rally that Samajwadi Party’s national general
secretary, Ramjilal Suman, motioned to slap district president Jitendra Verma
while Verma was speaking to the party supremo Akhilesh Yadav. In a video of the
incident, that has now gone viral, Akhilesh is seeing laughing while he calms
tempers.

The incident took
place in Uttar Pradesh’s Bah on Sunday.

Ramjilal Suman was
speaking at the podium when he noticed Jitendra Verma speaking to Akhilesh Yadav.
Suman turned away from his podium and signalled to slap the district president.
Akhilesh motioned him to stop, evidently amused, and sent him back to the podium
to address the rally.

Later, while
speaking at the rally, Akhilesh Yadav said he would help realise Bah’s
long-standing demand to become a district if the Samajwadi Party comes to
power.

The Uttar Pradesh
Assembly, with 403 seats, will go to polls in seven phases. Elections will be
held from February 10 to March 7 and the results are scheduled for March 10.

Akhilesh Yadav’s
Samajwadi Party is the principle challenger to the Bharatiya Janata Party in
the upcoming polls. In the 2017 Assembly elections, the BJP won 325 out of the
384 seats it contested, with the remaining going to alliance partners.

The Akhilesh-led
Samajwadi Party, in power until then, won just 43 of the 311 seats it
contested. This year, the Samajwadi Party is making a major pitch in a bid to
return to power.