Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav on Wednesday expressed confidence that the BJP will lose the upcoming Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh.
In an interview with ndtv.com, he also revealed that his party will not contest the polls with major parties, and instead would go for like-minded smaller parties for alliance.
"My experience with big parties is not good, I will not get into any alliance with them," Akhilesh told ndtv.com, without naming Mayawati's Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Congress.
The Samajwadi Party is targeting 300 of the 403 Assembly seats in Uttar Pradesh, he further said.
"The BJP is going to lose the upcoming UP elections... they failed the people of UP in the biggest test of their leadership. The government is still hiding the true Covid deaths," he SP chief said in the interview.
On being asked about the controversial comments he made on Covid-19 vaccines, the leader vowed to take his jab only after the poor of the state were fully inoculated free of cost.
"I had only refused to take the vaccine initially because it had not completed all the trials," Akhilesh said on concerns that he had initially fuelled vaccine hesitancy by refusing to take it and labelling Bharat Biotech's Covaxin as the "BJP vaccine".
The leader also refuted claims that the SP was not visible on the ground ahead of the state's Assembly polls. "We have held training camps across UP. When the farmer's protest began our karyakartas showed support. I myself wanted to go to Kannauj but was not allowed to leave my house... you can't just show what the BJP wants to project," the former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh asserted.