The Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD), both members of the Opposition INDIA bloc, on Friday made a crucial announcement on seat-sharing negotiations. The RLD, the parties decided, would contest seven of Uttar Pradesh’s 80 Lok Sabha seats in the coming elections. Notably, the RLD has never won more than five parliamentary seats in UP in a single election.

The RLD was founded by Ajit Singh, son of former Prime Minister Chaudhary Charan Singh, in 1996 and is currently led by Ajit’s son Jayant Chaudhary. The party has historically been allied with the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance, with Ajit serving as a Union Minister under former PM Manmohan Singh. Since 2014, though, the RLD’s influence has been limited in the Lok Sabha and Assembly elections.

In the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, the RLD contested eight seats in an alliance with the Congress but failed to win a single one. In the 2017 Assembly polls, the Congress and the SP struck an alliance and the RLD went alone. It contested 277 seats in the 403-member House, winning just one.

The SP-RLD alliance is relatively recent. The parties first came together in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. The RLD contested three seats then as part of the Mahagathbandhan with the SP and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). The RLD lost all three seats while the SP won five of the 37 seats it contested. The BSP managed to win 10 constituencies out of the 38 it contested.

By the 2022 Assembly polls, the BSP was out of the alliance with the SP, which then contested with the RLD. While the SP recorded one of its strongest performances in an Assembly poll and its best since 2012 when it came to power, winning 111 of the 347 seats it contested, the RLD won nine of the 33 seats it featured in. The Congress, which contested alone, recorded its worst performance in the state, winning only two constituencies.

The Congress, SP, and RLD have not been on the best of terms in the recent past and the seat-sharing talks were expected to run into some trouble. The SP openly expressed unhappiness about the seat-sharing process at the time of the Madhya Pradesh Assembly elections, when it accused the Congress of “cheating”. The RLD was also left unhappy when the Congress gave it just one seat in the Rajasthan Assembly polls last year.

In terms of the parties’ vote shares in Lok Sabha polls, the SP’s vote share in UP has been declining over the past four elections but has not dropped below 18%. The RLD, though, has only been a minor player in the national polls in UP, with its highest vote share in the last four elections coming in 2004 at 4.5%. In 2019, the SP recorded an 18.1% vote share and the RLD 1.7% for a combined vote share of 19.8%, slightly more than then ally BSP at 19.4% but well behind the BJP at 50%. The Congress recorded a vote share of 6.4%.

In the Assembly elections though, both the SP and RLD recorded improved performances in 2022 compared to 2017. In 2022, the SP’s 32.3% vote share exceeded its tally of 28.2% in 2012, when the party came to power. The RLD saw its vote share improve to 2.9% in 2022 from 1.8% in 2017. While 2022 was the SP’s best performance over the past 20 years, the RLD’s best vote share was recorded in 2007, when it got 3.7%. As the BSP’s influence has waned in recent years, the SP has emerged as the primary Opposition in the UP Assembly. The Congress, too, is now a minor player in state elections with its vote share dropping to 2.3%, below that of the RLD.

Though the parties have yet to announce which seven seats the RLD will contest, in 2019, all three of the party’s candidates finished in second place, including Ajit Singh from Muzaffarnagar and Jayant Chaudhary from Baghpat. The party saw one of its worst Lok Sabha performances in 2014, when Jayant finished the highest at second place in Mathura among the party’s eight candidates. That year, Ajit came third in Baghpat and every other party candidate ended fourth. In 2009, when the RLD won five Lok Sabha seats from the seven it contested, just one candidate finished second and one placed third. In 2004, when it contested 10 seats, the party won three, was the runner-up in three, and finished third or lower in four seats.

The RLD’s Assembly performances are more promising. In 2022, it contested 33 seats, of which it won eight and finished as the runner-up in 19 seats. The 2017 polls, though, were dismal. It contested the election alone, winning just one of 277 seats where it was in the fray and finished as the runner-up in four. It placed third or lower in 272 seats. In 2012, when the SP came to power, it contested 47 seats in an alliance with the Congress. That year, it won nine seats, placed second in 10 seats, and was third or lower in the remaining 28 seats.