Assembly over LS seat: Akhilesh Yadav quits as Parliamentarian, to stay as Karhal MLA

New Delhi: Ending speculations of whether to continue as MP or MLA, Samajwadi Party (SP) president Akhilesh Yadav has resigned from his Lok Sabha membership today.

The SP visited Speaker Om Birla’s office in Parliament and submitted his resignation. He won the Azamgarh Parliamentary seat in the 2019 general elections.

He will continue as the legislator from Karhal Assembly seat, which he won with a decisive margin in recently concluded polls. He secured 1,48,196 votes, while his nearest rival, Union Minister SP Singh Baghel of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), got 80,692 votes.

Yadav had never contested Assembly elections before 2022. Even during his tenure as CM, he was a member of the Legislative Council.

It was in the highly-charged electoral battle of 2022 that Akhilesh chose to contest in Assembly elections and fought from Karhal, a party’s stronghold.

#WATCH | Delhi: Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Akhilesh Yadav going to Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla’s office to resign from his membership of the House.

In the recently held Uttar Pradesh elections, he was elected as an MLA from the Karhal seat. pic.twitter.com/IBjc4jqr8t

— ANI (@ANI) March 22, 2022

The SP chief was BJP’s main challenger in the recently concluded Assembly elections. It won 111 out of 403 Assembly seats while BJP & its allies swept the state with 273 seats. Though, under his leadership, SP managed to significantly spike its vote share and saw a jump of about 10% but it didn’t reflect in corresponding numbers. The surge in BJP vote percentage was another reason for SP rout in the crucial elections.

Conceding defeat a day later, Akhilesh said that his party ensured that BJP seats were curtailed. However, during campaigning, his war cry was about fetching more than 300 seats. Its seats saw multifold rise, from 47 in 2017 to 111 in 2022 while for BJP, it was 325 in 2017 which got whittled down to 273 in 2022.