Lucknow: Asaduddin Owaisi and Chandrashekhar Azad announced a new front in Lucknow on Thursday, named the Azad Samaj Party (Kanshiram) chief its chief ministerial face for 2027, and claimed all 403 assembly seats in the state.
The front is the Samajik Parivartan Morcha. "I am happy to announce that our brother Chandrashekhar Azad will be the chief president of the SPM and its chief ministerial candidate in Uttar Pradesh," the AIMIM president said.
Azad, the Nagina MP, rejected the "third front" label. "This is not a third front, but a front for social change," he said, and left the door open to the Samajwadi Party and the Congress. "If SP, Congress or any other party wants to join us to stop BJP from coming to power, we are open to it."
On seats he was blunter. "All 403 seats are ours. We will fight the election like one party."
The arithmetic is the hard part. In 2022 the BJP won 255 seats, the SP 111, the BSP one and the Congress two. AIMIM contested 95 seats and drew about 0.49% of the vote. Azad's party won nothing. The front has already named 87 candidates, 38 of them from the Scheduled Castes, 29 from the OBCs, 19 Muslims and one Sikh.
Owaisi said the morcha would raise education, youth unemployment and farm distress, and argued that backward and Dalit communities had so far been used only as vote banks.
Asad Rizvi, a Lucknow-based political analyst, said the state is increasingly bipolar between the NDA and the INDIA bloc, and that converting Dalit and Muslim support into seats would be "a huge challenge" for the new front.
The alliance follows Owaisi's failed bid to enter the SP-Congress seat arrangement. He had set an October 2 deadline for a reply and got none.
Next: Azad's claim that the two partners have no disagreement over seat-sharing gets tested when the first list lands.