Meanwhile, the motley SVD government that administered Uttar Pradesh saw parties within it consistently at loggerheads in terms of policy, most notably on the issue of abolishing land revenue, which Charan Singh was not in favour of — keeping in mind the want of resources in the state. There was also little agreement on the strike conducted by state employees, which Singh had vigorously broken while other parties in the alliance had vowed to uphold their demands. Within a month of its inception a spell of defections and counter-defections had started taking place which was further disrupting the smooth functioning of the coalition. On the policy front, Singh capitulated to the Left parties on the matters of land abolition where he settled for a “gradual, but complete” abolition of land revenue in the next five years. 

In July, the coalition suffered another setback when four of its members lost to the Congress in the recent by-elections. The parties in government stressed that this cannot be taken as a no-confidence motion as the budget session was still in progress, and this was not an indictment of SVD policies. Nonetheless, C.B. Gupta, who was now the leader of the opposition, brought up a motion of no-confidence against the coalition and accused them of executive over-reach by having used state’s administrative apparatus to embolden their own position. The ideological disparity among the groups which were seemingly pulling in “nine opposite directions” he further stressed. Rubbishing these charges, the SVD made clear that the coalition had made possible what the Congress couldn’t in years of its rule, viz, the abolition of land revenue. Charan Singh pushed back against Gupta and said that the SVD was a novel experiment in coalitions and the set of ministers from the SVD were “as much his prisoners” as he was theirs. The motion was lost, and SVD prevailed.