Samajwadi Party dissolves Kannauj unit, BJP takes aim at Akhilesh's PDA strategy

With the BJP targeting the Samajwadi Party over the 'sparse' turnout at a PDA conference in Akhilesh Yadav's Lok Sabha constituency, the episode has turned into a political contest over crowd mobilisation ahead of the 2027 UP elections.

The "sparse" turnout at a Samajwadi Party (SP) 'PDA' conference in Kannauj -- party chief Akhilesh Yadav's Lok Sabha constituency -- has provided the BJP with fresh ammunition to question the SP's claims of expanding its support base among non-Yadav Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and Dalits.

Purported photographs and videos of the October 16 conference, attended by SP's Uttar Pradesh state president Shyam Lal Pal, showed rows of empty chairs. Following this, the SP's Kannauj district unit, including its frontal organisations, was dissolved.

The BJP's attack has centred on the significance of the venue. Kannauj is not merely another district for the SP: it is Akhilesh's Lok Sabha constituency and a political stronghold associated with the Yadav family.

Om Prakash Rajbhar, president of the Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party and a minister in the BJP-led government, targeted Akhilesh's claim to represent backward communities and Bahujans. In a post on social media, he asked the SP chief to dissolve the party's state-wide organisation ahead of the elections, arguing that the Kannauj episode exposed the limits of his political outreach.

The SP, however, maintained that the dissolution was connected to the unit's performance.

Speaking to The Indian Express, SP spokesperson Udaiveer Singh said, "The BJP has no idea what it is talking about. It was an organisational event, and the party felt that the performance of the district committee was not appropriate, so it was dissolved later."

Singh said the BJP's own public meetings had not always witnessed the kind of turnout its leaders claimed to command. "The fact remains that despite deploying a huge police force, recent BJP events, including those addressed by the Chief Minister in Varanasi, did not draw a decent crowd. Their big leaders have failed to attract crowds, yet they are taunting us over an organisational meeting," he said.

'SP makes big claims'

Former Kannauj MP and BJP leader Subrat Pathak also seized on the empty chairs, saying SP leaders made big claims and waved party flags but could not fill even 100 chairs at their conference. He questioned how the party expected to take on the BJP in elections if it could not draw a substantial crowd to its own organisational event.

Uttar Pradesh Minister Asim Arun also targeted the SP, arguing that dissolving the district committee or appointing a new one would not address the "party's deeper problem".

"The SP never had support beyond the family," Arun said, adding that changes in the organisation would make little difference unless the party changed its policies and intentions. He also claimed that the party lacked support across UP.

The BJP's Uttar Pradesh unit also shared a post contrasting the SP's claims of a large public following with the empty chairs at the conference, arguing that actual public participation, rather than political rhetoric, reflected a party's support.

SP pushback

The controversy comes at a time when the SP is seeking to consolidate its PDA -- Pichhda, Dalit, Alpsankhyak (backward classes, Dalits and minorities) -- political coalition ahead of the 2027 Assembly elections and is undertaking PDA sammelans across the state.

The strategy has been central to the party's attempt to broaden its social base beyond its traditional Yadav and Muslim support.

Senior SP leaders, however, said the dissolution of the district unit was intended to push the organisation to take its activities more seriously ahead of the polls, and should not be seen as evidence of a wider decline in the party's electoral prospects.

Leaders of the dissolved unit, meanwhile, said booth workers were occupied with the Special Summary Revision of voter rolls, which they considered more important at this juncture.