Akhilesh dares CM Yogi to contest from Ayodhya in assembly elections

Samajwadi Party National President and MP Akhilesh Yadav during a religious event in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh on October 8, 2026. | Photo credit: PTI

Samajwadi Party (SP) President Akhilesh Yadav on Thursday (October 8, 2026) in Ayodhya urged Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath to contest from Ayodhya in the upcoming assembly elections, adding that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is nervous.

“If a Chief Minister who makes big claims is so confident, then he should contest the elections from Ayodhya alone,” said Mr. Yadav, who attended the Shrimad Bhagwat Katha held at the ancestral home of Samajwadi Party leader and former minister Tej Narayan Pandey alias Pawan Pandey in Ayodhya. The Samajwadi Party (SP) won the Faizabad (Ayodhya) Lok Sabha seat in the 2024 parliamentary elections when its candidate Awadhesh Prasad defeated BJP candidate Lallu Singh by over 54,000 votes.

The SP leader promised to speed up the growth of Ayodhya and claimed that in the name of development, demolition would be under BJP’s watch. “In future, the SP government will give our mothers and sisters ₹40,000 every year. If there is a Samajwadi government in the future, you will not be discriminated or your shop or house will be demolished. In the future, when the Samajwadi government is formed, we will work to accelerate development so that Ayodhya gets recognition, low power, high discrimination and international discrimination. For us, who is Lord Sri Ram is the same as Lord Sri Krishna and who is Sri Krishna, is the same as Sri Rama.

Addressing the devotees present on the occasion, Mr. Yadav said that today in the holy land of Ayodhya, the birthplace of Lord Shri Ram, all the devotees chant Jai Radheshyam together. “That is the beauty of our society, country and culture. Elections will be the biggest celebration of democracy, when the elections are held, the time will come to decide,” he said.

“The culture and tradition of our country is great. We have been listening to the story of Ramayana and Mahabharata since childhood. We have personally heard from childhood that the one who frees us from the slavery of existence is Bhagwat. Today we see the society as full of slavery and suffering. Sometimes there is ego, arrogance of power, somewhere there is arrogance created by caste and somewhere it is discrimination. It can be seen that there is also enmity and untouchability. Along with the division of pure and impure, there are many kinds of social discrimination In such times the importance of Bhagwat Katha further increases,” Mr. Yadav added.

Published – 9 Oct 2026 03:03 IST