All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen chief Asaduddin Owaisi on Sunday announced that his party will contest 100 seats in the Uttar Pradesh elections next year. In a series of tweets, Owaisi said that the the party has started the process of selecting its candidates.

“We will fight the elections with Om Prakash Rajbhar’s ‘Bhagidari Sankalp Morcha’ and we have not had talks with any other party or alliance,” Owaisi said.

Rajbhar heads the Suheldev Bhartiya Samaj Party and is a prominent leader of the Other Backward Classes community. The Bhagidari Sankalp Morcha is an alliance of his party and some other regional outfits.

His party had won four seats in the 2017 Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections and was an ally of the Bharatiya Janata Party. However, he had a fallout with the saffron party on seat allocation in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. He alleged that the BJP was misusing his party’s name and flag for election campaigning in the state.

Rajbhar, who was the backward class welfare and divyangjan empowerment minister in the Adityanath-led government, was sacked from the state Cabinet in May 2019. However, Rajbhar claimed that he had already tendered his resignation a month earlier and it was not accepted.

Owaisi’s announcement on alliance with Rajbhar’s party came on the same day when Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati said that her party would fight Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand state elections on its own. Earlier, there were media reports of a possible tie-up of the BSP and the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen.

The 403-member Uttar Pradesh Assembly is likely to go to polls in February-March 2022.