Our utility for UPA ended with trust-vote: Amar Singh

He added that the future of the political tie-up would entirely “depend on post polls dynamics, with numbers playing a major role”.

Singh, however, said that despite the Congress failing to fulfil the SP’s “reasonable demands on political and economic issues”, the party would continue to support it from outside, as “I see some ray of hope in Soniaji and Rahul”.

“While UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi and Amethi MP Rahul Gandhi give us due respect, it seems that people under them are not under their control,” the SP leader claimed.

Singh lamented that some of the Congress leaders have termed him as “mental case” and “blackmailer”. “We have the numbers and they will come to us again after the Lok Sabha elections,” Singh said.

He said the seat-sharing talks with Congress would now be restricted to Uttar Pradesh only. “Now we will not ask for seats in Madhya Pradesh. On one hand they break our MLAs and on the other we discuss seat-sharing,” he said.

He claimed that while SP was a strong force in UP, Congress was asking for 31 seats. “They want us to accommodate them in UP, but they are not accommodating us in MP,” he said.

On his party’s demand for a judicial probe into the Jamia Nagar encounter, an issue which is growing as a contentious one between the two parties, Amar Singh said, “we have hopes from Soniaji.”

The SP and Congress came together in July when the former helped the UPA government sail through the crucial trust vote in the Lok Sabha after the Left withdrew support over the Indo-US nuclear deal.

While forming a Coordination Committee with Congress, the SP refused an offer to join the Cabinet. But after two meetings of the Coordination Committee, SP leader Amar Singh has been complaining that the Congress-led UPA government “is not listening to it on major political and economic issues.”

He also complained that even on economic issues like windfall tax and SEZs, the government has failed to heed to SP’s views.

SP has also been critical about the Centre’s handling of the situation in Maharashtra where there has been an escalation in violent attacks on north Indians.

Singh said on Wednesday that despite Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s intervention, the Congress-led government in Maharashtra has not been able to prevent such incidents.

A young Uttar Pradesh migrant labourer had died after being severely beaten in a local train by fellow commuters following a squabble. In another incident a youth from Patna was gunned down by the police in a Mumbai bus on Monday.