New Delhi:
The Samajwadi Party has said it will not work with election management firm I-PAC for next year’s Uttar Pradesh Assembly election. Party boss Akhilesh Yadav told reporters Wednesday afternoon he walked back the agreement over a lack of funds.
Sources told NDTV that I-PAC – set up by poll strategist Prashant Kishor, who is no longer associated with the group – was supposed to work in constituencies where the margin of defeat in the 2022 election was narrow.
However, Akhilesh Yadav’s party will reportedly continue working with a second election management and social media firm – Showtime – in accordance with a contract signed around two months ago. In a lighter vein, Yadav, when pressed on why the I-PAC deal was scrapped, joked: “We simply don’t have funds. If you (the media) give us funds, we can hire another company.”
This comes after the Trinamool Congress and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam – two opposition parties I-PAC worked with in the build-up to last month’s Bengal and Tamil Nadu elections – slipped to massive defeats.
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