Samajwadi Party veteran Mulayam Singh Yadav on Sunday said its decision to ally with the Congress for Uttar Pradesh Assembly election had led to the “poor state” the was in now. Yadav blamed his son Akhilesh Yadav, the party’s national president, for going through with the alliance despite his advice. “The SP is itself responsible for its defeat and not the people of the state,” he said to reporters at an event in Mainpuri, according to PTI.

“The Congress left no stone unturned to ruin my life. It lodged cases against me and Akhilesh forged alliance with it,” Mulayam Singh Yadav said, adding to the bad blood between him and his son, which has been escalating steadily for months. Mulayam Singh Yadav also said that his brother Shivpal Yadav was right in calling his cousin Ram Gopal Yadav, who supports Akhilesh Yadav, a “Shakuni” (the scheming uncle from the Mahabharata).

The in-fighting within the Samajwadi Party has shown no signs of stopping with the two factions – Mulayam Singh Yadav and Shivpal Yadav on side and Akhilesh Yadav and Ram Gopal Yadav on the other – taking turns to blame each other for all manner of the party’s problems.

On Friday, Shivpal Yadav announced that he will form a new party with Mulayam Singh Yadav as its national secretary called the Samajwadi Secular Morcha. However, when Mulayam Singh Yadav was asked about this on Sunday, he merely said that the Samajwadi Party should be strengthened.

Party leaders have blamed the family feud for SP’s abysmal performance in the polls, where it won only 47 seats in the 403-seats Assembly. The fractures started showing in September 2016, when Shivpal Yadav had been appointed the state SP chief, following which Akhilesh Yadav had relieved him of his Cabinet portfolios. The feud had escalated in December after the former chief minister had released his own list of candidates for the polls. However, despite all this, both factions had continuously maintained that they there were no differences in the party.