'For justice and equality': Why Rahul Gandhi's birthday wish to Akhilesh Yadav has left UP Congress in a fix

The dichotomy is a result of the Congress' massive organisation-building campaign currently underway in the state following the party's victory in six of the 17 seats it contested. The party is in the middle of a "Sangathan Srijan" (organisation building) campaign across all 75 districts in U.P. as it also gears up for the panchayat polls, which would be held in 2026.

The 100-day campaign has been launched to drive the effort with trained professionals overseeing implementation as the Congress is eyeing the panchayat polls to increase its rural penetration in U.P., UP Congress chief Avinash Pande told PTI recently.

Parallelly, party leaders in the state have pressed for a "respectable and suitable" alliance, going as far as to say that it did not require SP's "baisakhi" to contest elections in UP.

"The Congress is working to strengthen its organisation and we are building it till the booth level. Some people have given statements that we (the Congress) won’t have candidates. I would like to say that we are working hard on the ground and we don’t need crutches. We will fight on our own and if there is an understanding, it will be one of respect. We won’t let them (the SP) decide what seats we contest. We will decide if an understanding can be reached. And the decision has to be made by the party leadership," Congress MP from Saharanpur Imran Masood said, calling for a reset of ties between the two parties ahead of the 2027 polls in the state.

Masood had also made it clear that the "80-17 formula" won’t work. "In the Parliamentary elections, we were given 17 seats (of UP’s total 80 Lok Sabha seats). This won’t work. The votes were cast in Rahul Gandhi’s name. There are favourable conditions in Rahul ji’s name. I have said that if there is an understanding, it will have to be respectable," he added. The Congress won six of the 17 seats it contested in the 2024 LS polls in an alliance with the SP.

On Tuesday, however, Rahul's message left Congress leaders wondering if that was the correct approach to be adopted towards the Samajwadi Party. While on one hand it works to reinvent itself in UP and strengthen its organization at multiple levels, Rahul's "shoulder-to-shoulder" remark has come as a word of caution for them.

Congress and SP contested the 2022 state polls separately. While SP improved its count from 47 to 111 seats, Congress was reduced to just two. Both parties got together again for the Lok Sabha elections and collectively bagged 3 of the 80 seats dealing a big blow to the BJP, whose tally came down to 33 from 63 which it had won in the state in the 2019 polls.

On his part, Akhilesh maintains that the SP's alliance with Congress remains intact and that the two parties would contest the Assembly polls in the state together.

"Our alliance with the Congress in UP is intact...those who want to leave the alliance, can go. We are not concerned with what some leaders write on social media or say. The alliance is on," he said in June, responding to the remarks by Congress' Masood.

SP sources then said that Akhilesh’s remarks were aimed at sending a clear message to the party leaders and workers, who were skeptical about the continuation of the alliance between the two parties.

However, it remains to be seen how the bonhomie between Akhilesh and Rahul translates during seat-sharing talks. SP insiders believe that there is no reason why the party would leave a disproportionate number of seats for the Congress, which has failed to leave a mark in the state in the past several elections.

The Congress party, which held power in the state for 31 years since 1952, has been out of office in UP since 1985. It has not crossed 30 seats in the state since 2002 and was reduced to single digits for the first time in 2017 when it won seven seats. That number fell further down in 2022 when the party could only win a meagre 2 seats.