"We are planning to fight 12 seats in next LS polls": UP RLD chief

Lucknow (Uttar Pradesh) [India], July 9 (ANI): Rashtriya Lok Dal president Ramashish Rai on Friday said his party is planning to fight 12 seats in next year's Lok Sabha elections, adding that the RLD lost the status of a state party in Uttar Pradesh as it fought on fewer seats than it had desired to contest in the 2022 Assembly elections.
Speaking to ANI on Saturday, Rai said, "We could have retained the state party status (in Up) if we had contested and won 15 seats. We are not angry with anyone. We want to reach a consensus with every party before declaring our candidates."
He stated further that the RLD sacrificed seats it had intended to contest and had reached a compromise so as not to break the alliance with the Samajwadi Party (SP) ahead of the UP Assembly elections in 2022.
"We sacrificed on some seats that we had desired to contest in the interest of keeping the alliance alive with the Samajwadi Party. We lost seats in Mathura and Aligarh as our supporters were upset at not being given the number of seats that we had desired to contest. Other parties in the alliance (with the SP) benefitted from the coalition more than us in the last Assembly elections. We even lost our state party status," he said.
On April 10, the Election Commission revoked the state party status of the RLD as it had failed to bag 6 per cent of the total votes polled in the state.
RLD, which fought the last state elections in UP with the SP, contested 33 seats, winning just 8. (ANI)