Assembly election results in four states to have bearing on Lok Sabha polls, says Azad

Srinagar: Democratic Progressive Azad Party leader Ghulam Nabi Azad on Sunday said the outcome of the elections to four state assemblies will have a bearing on next year's Lok Sabha polls.

"We are just there-and-a-half months away from the Lok Sabha elections. The results of these (assembly) polls will definitely have a bearing on the parliamentary elections," Azad told reporters earlier in the day when the trends began to come in.

The BJP is set to win in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, according to the latest counting trends, while the Congress is ahead in Telangana.

Azad said, "One thing I have noticed over the past 25 days is that the Congress has abandoned the minorities. The debates from both the BJP and the Congress were limited to the backward classes -- they asked about how many chief ministers are from backward classes."

"Not one leader from the Congress asked even once how many chief ministers are there from the minorities," he added.

Azad -- who quit the Congress to form the Democratic Progressive Azad Party (DPAP) -- said while the BJP is not expected to talk about the minorities, the grand old party has also abandoned them in favour of the SCs and the STs over the years.

"It is a matter of concern and needs pondering over. While Indira Gandhi would talk about the Muslims and the SCs being poor, it later became minorities and SCs. The new leadership over the past eight-nine years has ignored the minorities and limited itself to only the SCs and the STs," he added.