Ahead of the Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls in 2017, the Samajwadi Party (SP), then in power, hammered out an alliance with the Congress to take on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which had performed formidably in the Lok Sabha polls in the state three years earlier.
Top leaders of the SP and Congress — Akhilesh Yadav (pictured) and Rahul Gandhi, respectively — held a massive roadshow in Lucknow. This did not work, and the BJP handed down a humiliating defeat to the combine as well as the other contender, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). Even as the BJP won 325