A day after the exits of two ministers and four MLAs from the Yogi Adityanath government in Uttar Pradesh (UP), two lawmakers – one from the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the other from the Congress – joined the BJP on Wednesday, 12 January.
Hari Om Yadav, who defected to the saffron fold from the SP, on Thursday, accused former boss Akhilesh Yadav of running "a party of bootlickers."
"Samajwadi Party is no longer the party of Mulayam Singh Yadav (Akhilesh Yadav's father). It is a party of bootlickers who have surrounded Akhilesh and want to weaken him," he said.
"Ram Gopal Yadav (the SP's general secretary and a Rajya Sabha MP) and his son do not want me in the party... they feel that I am a threat to their existence," Hari Om Yadav alleged.
The former Sirsaganj MLA, who joined the BJP in Delhi on Wednesday, is also Mulayam Yadav's cousin.
On the same day, Congress MLA Naresh Saini from the Behat Assembly seat of Saharanpur also joined the BJP.
The two leaders joined the saffron party in the presence of senior BJP leaders from Uttar Pradesh.
The party shared pictures of the newly recruited members with its senior leaders on social media.
The development comes as a significant boost to the BJP, which is still recovering from the shock of four MLAs quitting the party on Tuesday.
MLAs Vinay Shakya, Roshan Lal Verma, Brijesh Prajapati, and Bhagwati Sagar were the ones who had resigned. They are set to join the SP.
The BJP was also left embarrassed on Tuesday after Other Backward Class (OBC) leader Swami Prasad Maurya resigned from the UP Cabinet and decided to join the SP.
Maurya had claimed that Dalits, backward classes, and youths were being neglected by the UP government.
(With inputs from NDTV.)
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)