SP misses the bus at Centre again

It is a double whammy for Samajwadi Party which has again missed the bus at the Centre.

The party which helped the Manmohan Singh government survive after the Left pulled out support has been left high and dry after the Lok Sabha elections.

Not only the party's tally has come down drastically from 39 seats in 2004 to 23 seats now, but it has again been forced by circumstances to support the government from outside.

Also there is a drastic drop of the voting percentage of the party from 26.74 per cent in 2004 to 23.26 per cent in the just-concluded polls.

The only consolation for Mulayam Singh Yadav's party is that it emerged as the single largest with 23 seats in Uttar Pradesh, while its arch rival BSP ended up with just 20 in spite of a larger vote share of 27.42 per cent.

Like this time, SP had also failed to get a place in the UPA government in 2004 despite emerging as the single largest party in UP with 39 seats.

Both in 2004 and 2009, the SP has failed to make it to the government due to the fact that it could not be the part of the Congress-led alliance.

In 2004, when Congress had been virtually begging the SP to forge an alliance, Yadav and his close associate Amar Singh took the line of maintaining equi-distance from the Congress and the BJP, so as to spurn the offer from Sonia Gandhi.