Seat pact with SP done, Congress hopes to seal all deals by March first week

After protracted negotiations and some compromises on both sides, the Samajwadi Party and the Congress finally sealed their seat-sharing deal, on Wednesday (February 21), for the upcoming Lok Sabha polls. The SP will contest 63 of the 80 Lok Sabha constituencies in Uttar Pradesh, leaving 17 for its ally.

In an expected move meant to make amends for the slight caused to SP chief Akhilesh Yadav during last year’s Madhya Pradesh Assembly polls, the Congress has also conceded one seat — Khajuraho — to the SP in MP, where it will now contest on 28 seats. This would be the first instance of the Grand Old Party leaving a Lok Sabha constituency in MP to an ally in the general elections. During the recent MP assembly polls, the Congress’s then state unit chief Kamal Nath had refused to enter into any seat-sharing arrangement with the SP despite his party’s central leadership repeatedly nudging him to explore the possibility of an alliance.

UP, MP done

The deal in UP and MP is the first seat-sharing arrangement to be finalised between the Congress and a constituent of the Opposition’s imploding INDIA bloc, which over the past month has seen major exits, including those of the Nitish Kumar-led Janata Dal (United) and Jayant Chaudhary’s RLD, which have since joined the BJP-led NDA coalition. Additionally, INDIA constituents such as Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress and Dr Farooq Abdullah’s National Conference have also emphatically rejected any seat sharing arrangements in Bengal and Jammu & Kashmir, respectively.

Congress sources told The Federal that with the negotiations for UP and MP — the two states collectively account for 109 of the Lok Sabha’s 543 seats — now finalised, the party hopes to seal seat-sharing agreements with other INDIA partners, such as Arvind Kejriwal’s AAP (for Delhi only), Lalu Yadav’s RJD (for Bihar), Hemant Soren’s JMM (for Jharkhand), Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena faction and Sharad Pawar’s NCP faction (for Maharashtra), the DMK (in Tamil Nadu) and the Left Front (for Bengal) by the first week of March. The Congress, sources said, wants to finalise the seat-sharing pact with Lalu and Tejashwi Yadav’s RJD and the Left parties for Bihar by March 1 following which the allies are likely to have a joint rally at Patna’s iconic Gandhi Maidan, tentatively scheduled for March 3.

“Final lap”

Of these INDIA partners, the negotiations with the AAP continue to be tricky, Congress sources admitted, while asserting that backchannel talks between Kejriwal and Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge “are near a breakthrough” despite reservations of the Delhi leaders of both parties. “We will have an alliance with AAP for Delhi; the Congress president has discussed the details with Kejriwal and our Delhi leaders have been informed... some minor details need to be sorted out but this will be done in a day or two,” a senior Congress functionary said.

A party leader, who is attached to the Congress president’s office, told The Federal, “Kharge had assured all INDIA partners even before the seat-sharing negotiations began that the central leadership will step in to resolve any hurdles and that the Congress is fully committed to the success of the alliance... Discussions by our alliance committee (headed by Mukul Wasnik) are over and now we are in the final lap; the high command is stepping in wherever needed but you need to understand that they too can’t discuss all states at one go. UP and MP are done, we will proceed with remaining states now and by the first week of March everything will be in place.”

Role of high command

This mechanism of the central leadership chipping in to defuse a stalemate in the talks played out during negotiations with the Samajwadi Party, too, said Congress sources. “We started with a request to contest 23 of the 80 seats and eventually climbed down to 19 seats while the SP began with offering us 11 and then, after Jayant Chaudhary switched to the BJP, Akhilesh was willing to give us 15 seats. There was some heartburn within our state leaders because of the SP unilaterally announcing candidates on X and after Akhilesh indicated that he would participate in Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra only after the seat-sharing deal is finalised. All this is now in the past; the high command stepped in at the right time and all issues are resolved now,” said a UP Congress leader.

Sources in both the Congress and the SP confirmed to The Federal that seat-sharing talks between the two parties were at an impasse after the former refused to accept less than 19 seats (including Moradabad, Shravasti, Domariyaganj, and Varanasi) in the alliance while the latter made a “last offer” of 17 seats. With Rahul’s BJNY currently passing through UP and Akhilesh’s absence from it — the SP chief had initially told Kharge that he would join the yatra in the traditional Gandhi family strongholds of Rae Bareli and Amethi — painting poor optics for the already besieged INDIA bloc, sources said Kharge, former Congress president Sonia Gandhi, and party general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra worked in tandem to ensure that negotiations with Akhilesh concluded before Rahul’s hybrid yatra rolled out of UP.

Akhilesh’s importance

Kharge and Sonia are learnt to have told Congress in-charge of UP, Avinash Pande, and the party’s state unit chief Ajay Rai that their insistence for 19 seats was “unjustified” given the party’s virtually non-existent grassroots presence in India’s most populous state. The two leaders, party sources told The Federal, also told Congress organisational general secretary and key Rahul aide, KC Venugopal, that an alliance with Akhilesh cannot be jettisoned “at any cost” as a multi-cornered contest in UP between the BJP, SP, Mayawati’s BSP, and the Congress would “harm the Congress the most”.

Priyanka, who has reportedly not been keeping well recently and has even been unable to join Rahul on the UP leg of his yatra so far on account of being hospitalised, worked the phones to negotiate directly with Akhilesh. Sources said ultimately their central leadership was amenable to accepting Akhilesh’s offer of 17 seats but after some “give and take” in the choice of constituencies that the SP was willing to spare for the Congress.

Priyanka’s intervention

The Congress was keen on fielding its own candidate against Narendra Modi in Varanasi, where the SP had already announced Surendra Patel as its candidate. Priyanka is also learnt to have implored Akhilesh to spare the Moradabad seat for the Congress. Similarly, an offer was also made that the SP field its candidate from Hathras, a seat it had initially offered to the Congress, and, instead, give Sitapur, which the SP wanted, to the Congress. The Congress was also keen on contesting the Shravasti seat and informed Akhilesh that it was open to giving up Mathura or Bulandshahr in exchange.

Of these demands, the SP finally conceded the Varanasi and Sitapur seats to the Congress but refused to give up Moradabad, from where its leader ST Hasan is the sitting Lok Sabha MP. The Congress high command, sources said, has also been informed that the SP is “not entirely rejecting their request for swapping Shravasti with Mathura or Bulandshahr but would need a day or two to think this over”.

Congress’s Pande and Rai and the SP’s Naresh Uttam Patel and Rajendra Chaudhary then made the official announcement of the seat-sharing arrangement. As per the official announcement, the Congress will field candidates in Rae Bareli, Amethi, Varanasi, Kanpur Nagar, Fatehpur Sikri, Bansgaon, Maharajganj, Prayagraj, Amroha, Jhansi, Bulandshahr, Deoria, Saharanpur, Ghaziabad, Mathura, Sitapur and Barabanki.

SP on the back foot

While Chaudhary confirmed that the SP will withdraw its candidate from Varanasi, Hasan told The Federal that his party could allot seats to its existing allies in the state, such as Krishna Patel’s Apna Dal (K) and other smaller caste-based outfits, from its present kitty of 63 seats. There is also the possibility of the SP sparing one seat for Dalit leader Chandrashekhar Azad’s Azad Samaj Party and of both the SP and the Congress also reaching out to backward caste leader Swami Prasad Maurya, who quit the SP earlier this week and is likely to float his own outfit ahead of the polls, to stand with the INDIA bloc instead of returning to the BJP/NDA fold or to the BSP.

SP sources told The Federal that a “possible reason” for Akhilesh ceding some ground to the Congress was the turbulence that his party has faced in recent weeks following the desertion of RLD’s Jayant Chaudhary and over his choice of fielding Jaya Bachchan and retired bureaucrat Alok Ranjan as two of the SP’s three Rajya Sabha poll candidates — the third being Dalit leader Ramjilal Suman. The SP chief’s decision of granting tickets to two upper-class leaders (Bachchan and Ranjan, both Kayasthas) and not to minority and backward-class faces while speaking of empowering PDA (Pichchda, Dalit, Alpsankhyak) has angered SP leaders and allies from the two communities. SP ally Apna Dal (K) has already declared that it would not vote for the SP candidate in the Rajya Sabha polls while Swami Prasad Maurya quit as SP MLC and from the party in protest.