Behind the deadlock in the talks between the Samajwadi Party and the Congress for an electoral alliance in Uttar Pradesh, sources said, is a smug misreading by the Congress of Akhilesh Yadav’s status at the negotiating table.
A resurgent UP Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav, after winning the battle within his party and family, is said to have been peeved that Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi sent political lightweights such as Prashant Kishor and former IAS officer Dheeraj Srivastava — who are “nobody in the Congress system” — to talk of seat-sharing instead of party veterans or, at the least, a member of the CWC, the party’s highest decision-making body.
This attitude of the Congress, to play a national party vis-a-vis what it sees as a regional player, touched a raw nerve in the SP leadership, sources said.
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