The Samajwadi Party lost three more sitting MLAs to its main rival on Wednesday. Rakesh Pratap Singh of Gauriganj, Abhay Singh of Gosaiganj and Vinod Chaturvedi of Kalpi formally joined the Bharatiya Janata Party at a membership event in Gauriganj, the Amethi district headquarters, a little over a year before Uttar Pradesh votes in the 2027 Assembly elections.
The three had drifted away from Akhilesh Yadav's party long ago, but Wednesday's ceremony made the switch official. The BJP picked the venue with care. Amethi, once a Congress stronghold, has become one of the most watched constituencies in the country.
Who joined and where
BJP Uttar Pradesh president and Union Minister Pankaj Chaudhary presided over the event. BJP national general secretary Smriti Irani spoke at length. Also on stage were OBC Morcha national president and MP Amar Pal Maurya, former Union minister Sanjeev Balyan and several state ministers, among them Daya Shankar Singh, Dara Singh Chauhan and Dinesh Singh.
| Event | BJP joining programme for three rebel SP MLAs |
| Date | Wednesday, October 14, 2026 |
| Venue | Gauriganj, Amethi district, Uttar Pradesh |
| MLAs who joined | Rakesh Pratap Singh (Gauriganj), Abhay Singh (Gosaiganj), Vinod Chaturvedi (Kalpi) |
| Presiding leader | Pankaj Chaudhary, UP BJP president |
| Next big test | Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections, 2027 |
The three MLAs and their seats
Rakesh Pratap Singh, Gauriganj
Rakesh Pratap Singh has won Gauriganj three times on an SP ticket, in 2012, 2017 and 2022. In 2022 he beat the BJP's candidate by 6,963 votes. His break with the SP leadership became public when he voted for the BJP candidate in the 2024 Rajya Sabha elections. He told the gathering that he joined the BJP to help it win Gauriganj, a seat he has held for more than a decade.
Abhay Singh, Gosaiganj
Abhay Singh first won Gosaiganj in 2012 and won it again in 2022, defeating Aarti Tiwari by 13,079 votes. He said he left the SP over the Ramcharitmanas controversy. In his view, the party leadership had failed to speak up against remarks he called an insult to Lord Ram. He also said he would work to defeat the SP candidate in his seat in 2027.
Vinod Chaturvedi, Kalpi
Vinod Chaturvedi represents Kalpi in Jalaun district, a seat he won in 2007 and again in 2022. He credited development work in Bundelkhand under the Modi and Yogi Adityanath governments for his decision and criticised what he described as caste-based politics in the SP.
A rift that began in 2024
The roots of Wednesday's move go back to the 2024 Rajya Sabha polls, when a group of SP legislators backed the BJP. In June 2025 the SP expelled Abhay Singh, Rakesh Pratap Singh and Manoj Kumar Pandey, accusing them of "communal divisive negativity" and of supporting an "anti-PDA" line. PDA is the SP's slogan for Pichde (backward classes), Dalits and Alpsankhyak (minorities). Pandey, who had resigned as SP chief whip before cross-voting, later joined the BJP and became a cabinet minister in the Yogi Adityanath government in May 2026. Since their expulsion, the other two had sat in the Assembly as unattached members.
What the BJP leaders said
Pankaj Chaudhary used the occasion to aim at both the SP and the Congress. "Today, not one, not two, but three MLAs are joining the Bharatiya Janata Party family," he said, adding that the SP chief needs to do some serious introspection. He went on to say, "Amethi and Rae Bareli are not the personal fiefdom of any family." He predicted that the BJP would win across the state in 2027, including in Amethi and Rae Bareli, and form a third straight government.
Smriti Irani, who won Amethi from Rahul Gandhi in 2019 and lost it to the Congress's Kishori Lal Sharma in 2024, kept her focus on the Gandhi family. "The Gandhi family does not have the courage to contest elections alone in Amethi," she said. She also accused the Congress of blaming the Election Commission instead of looking at its own defeats and said the party had lost nine consecutive Assembly elections in UP since 1989.
Amar Pal Maurya accused Akhilesh Yadav of abandoning the socialist ideas of Ram Manohar Lohia and Mulayam Singh Yadav. No response from the Samajwadi Party had been reported by the time of the event.
Why this matters for Uttar Pradesh
On paper, three MLAs don't change the numbers in a House where the BJP-led alliance already has a comfortable majority. The signal matters more than the arithmetic. Gauriganj lies in Amethi, which the Congress won back in 2024, and Gosaiganj in Ayodhya district, a region where the SP made big gains in that year's Lok Sabha polls. Kalpi gives the BJP another sitting face in Bundelkhand.
The defections also feed a story the BJP wants to tell before 2027: that the opposition's PDA coalition is fraying at the edges. Whether these leaders can carry their personal vote to a new party is something only the voters of these three seats can settle.
The timing is notable too. Opposition parties have spent the past week focused on their campaign against the Election Commission in Delhi, and the BJP is using events like this to keep its organisation busy at the district level.
What happens next
Expect both parties to intensify candidate selection in the coming months. The BJP will have to manage its own local aspirants in Gauriganj, Gosaiganj and Kalpi, who may now find their path blocked by the newcomers. The SP will need fresh faces strong enough to hold seats it won in 2022. With the 2027 election calendar getting closer, more such switches across parties are likely, and each one will be read as a test of momentum in India's most politically important state.
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