After the Samajwadi Party announced the names of 16 candidates for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections, Uttar Pradesh Congress in-charge Avinash Pandey on Wednesday said that the Samajwadi Party’s “one-sided” alliance policy is not acceptable to his party.

Speaking to news agency ANI, Pande said that the list released by the Samajwadi Party also included seats which the Congress party sought to contest and further claimed that the list was released without the knowledge of the party.

“What the Samajwadi party is doing is very dangerous and Congress itself is not getting information about it. Congress follows the coalition dharma well and wherever Congress forms an alliance, it follows its coalition dharma,” he said.

Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav on Saturday had announced that his party will offer 11 Lok Sabha seats to it in Uttar Pradesh.

The UP Congress in-charge also said that it is “laughable” that the Samajwadi Party or any other party claim that they have given seats to the Congress, asserting that there needs to be a consensus between the alliance partners.

“We all need to come to a consensus. First, the BJP needs to be defeated. but how to defeat them, for that, all parties involved need to agree whether it is in terms of seats or any strategy. We will have to keep coordinating from time to time,” he said.

“There is no unilateral decision, all the people involved in the alliance come together and unanimously announce that thing,” Pande added.

On Tuesday, the Samajwadi Party released the names of 16 candidates for the upcoming 2024 elections. Akhilesh’s wife Dimple Yadav will be contesting from Mainpuri, while Sambhal Shafiqur Rahman Barq and Ravidas Mehrotra have been given tickets from Sambhal and Lucknow respectively.

Dimple Yadav, had won the Mainpuri Parliamentary seat by-election in December last year, securing a victory by a massive margin of over 2 lakh votes. She had defeated BJP’s Raghuraj Singh Shakya. The by-election was necessitated following the demise of Samajwadi Party patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav on October 10.