Haryana polls: Rahul’s proposal for alliance with AAP, SP infuses fresh intrigue

In July, during his maiden address in the Lok Sabha as the Leader of Opposition, Rahul Gandhi had said that it was incumbent upon him, in his new role, to not just be the voice of his party but to also take the wider Opposition along, both inside Parliament and outside it. Over the past two days, as Rahul huddled with members of his party’s central election committee (CEC) to finalise candidates for the October 5 Haryana Assembly polls, the Congress realised that the LoP’s words weren’t quintessential political rhetoric.

A fleeting but significant comment by Rahul during these deliberations has sent his party leaders from poll-bound Haryana into a tizzy. With the September 12 deadline for filing nominations for the elections fast approaching and the Congress having already finalised 66 candidates for the 90-member state Assembly, Rahul now wants to explore the possibility of accommodating INDIA bloc partners, Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the Samajwadi Party (SP),  in a pre-poll alliance.

Though he has left it to his party’s Haryana leadership to assess whether such an alliance would be viable, Rahul’s query at the CEC discussions over the possibility of leaving “some seats” for the AAP and the SP has left many baffled.

Back-channel talks have begun

Deepak Babaria, the Congress’s Haryana desk in-charge, confirmed that negotiations with the AAP and the SP had been initiated “as per the direction of the central leadership” and that a final call on it would be taken “in the next two days”. Sources said back-channel discussions with Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal’s party had begun between AAP MPs Raghav Chaddha and Sandeep Pathak and the Congress’s treasurer and chief of the Haryana candidate screening committee Ajay Maken, former Haryana CM Bhupinder Singh Hooda, and Babaria.

The Congress, which had left one of Haryana’s 10 Lok Sabha seats to the AAP during the recent general election – the AAP contested and lost the Kurukshetra seat – is willing to cede between three and seven seats for Kejriwal’s party in the assembly polls, said sources, adding that a “maximum of two seats” could be offered to Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party too.

Though senior AAP leader and Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Singh welcomed the Congress’s initiative, asserting the need to keep the INDIA bloc “united to defeat the BJP”, his party’s Haryana unit chief, Sushil Gupta, told reporters that an alliance with the Congress “would be meaningless” if it is “only for a few seats”.

AAP wants at least 15 seats

Gupta, who was the AAP’s losing candidate from Kurukshetra in the Lok Sabha polls, is learnt to have urged his party’s negotiators to seek at least 15 seats from the Congress in the seat-sharing arrangement; a formula Congress’s Haryana leaders told The Federal was “fanciful” and “absolutely unacceptable”. Interestingly, over the past month, Gupta has been travelling extensively across Haryana, often with other senior AAP leaders from Delhi and Punjab and even the jailed Kejriwal’s wife, Sunita Kejriwal, in tow to mobilise support for the party. Sunita has been making an emotional pitch to the people of Haryana, hard-selling her husband as the “son of Haryana” (Kejriwal was born in Siwani town of Haryana’s Bhiwani district).

Discussions between the negotiators from the two parties are expected to continue on Wednesday (September 4), with Congress general secretary (organisation) and Rahul’s key aide, KC Venugopal, overseeing them. What has left many wondering, though, is why Rahul moved the idea of an alliance so late in the day; and despite all surveys conducted by Congress’s poll strategists suggesting a sweeping win of nearly 65 seats for his party in the state that the BJP has been ruling since 2014.

'Only 10 seats available for allies'

The notification for the Haryana assembly polls is scheduled to be issued on Thursday (September 5), kicking off the procedure for filing nominations. Late Tuesday evening, Babaria told media persons that the party’s CEC had already finalised as many as 66 candidates while the panel had sought “some more information” on potential candidates for another dozen constituencies. Requesting anonymity, a member of the CEC also confirmed to The Federal, that “66 names have been finalised and candidates for 14 seats were nearly finalised”. If an alliance has to be made with the AAP and the SP, the CEC member said, it will have to be “only for the remaining 10 seats”.

Sources said the prospect of a Congress-AAP alliance, though at Rahul’s behest, has also triggered added discord within the already-fragmented Haryana Congress. While Bhupinder Hooda, who was earlier opposed to any truck with the AAP, has surprisingly welcomed Rahul’s suggestion and even had himself chosen as one of the party’s negotiators, his staunchest intra-party rival, Sirsa MP Kumari Selja, along with several other prominent ‘anti-Hooda’ leaders, has opposed any alliance with Kejriwal’s outfit, asserting that the AAP has “no base and no appeal” in Haryana.

Alliance, a ‘Hooda ploy’?

Those in the anti-Hooda camp see a “Hooda ploy” in getting Rahul to propose a potential alliance with the AAP. A ticket aspirant close to a senior anti-Hooda camp leader told The Federal that Hooda “may be thinking that he can use the alliance to his advantage by offering seats in areas like Kurukshetra, Sirsa, Rewari, and Faridabad to the AAP as these are areas from where his rivals have sought tickets for themselves or their supporters… if seats in these areas go to AAP or SP, the share of candidates from his rival camp will automatically come down”.

Hooda baiters Selja, Congress MP Randeep Surjewala, former MLA Ajay Yadav, and former MP Avtar Singh Bhadana have their political clout in Sirsa, Kurukshetra, Rewari, and Faridabad, respectively.

Others in the Congress, however, see the idea of an alliance as part of Rahul’s own strategy to keep his INDIA bloc partners close.

“The general feedback from Haryana is that we are comfortably poised to win an absolute majority. The AAP has no real presence in Haryana and, perhaps, Rahul’s calculation is that Kejriwal will be happy to accept even a couple of seats because his party can ride on the Congress’s popularity to finally make a debut in the Haryana assembly; without our support, AAP won’t win anything. By giving up a few seats in Haryana to the AAP and a seat or two to the SP, maybe Rahul wants to strengthen the INDIA alliance for more important electoral battles in Delhi, Gujarat, and UP, where AAP and SP have a presence,” a Congress leader close to Rahul said.

Another party leader who has previously acted as the Congress high command’s emissary for alliance talks said, “alliances are all about give and take; may be if we give something to AAP in a state where it stands no chance of victory by going it alone, Kejriwal will be more favourably disposed to us when we have negotiations for seats in Delhi and Gujarat… remember that Rahul had made a promise in the Lok Sabha that the Congress will defeat BJP in the next Gujarat election (due in 2027) and we may need the AAP to make that possible; likewise, we need to keep Akhilesh in good humour because without the SP’s support, the Congress cannot hope for a revival in UP as of now… it is a gamble, but may be Rahul feels it is a gamble worth taking”.

‘A mistake to encourage AAP’

Whatever Rahul’s motivations may be, a sizeable section of the Congress believes the party would be “making a mistake” by encouraging and emboldening the AAP. The AAP has, so far, grown in states such as Delhi, Punjab, and Gujarat at the expense of the Congress. Many Congress leaders believe that Kejriwal’s bonhomie with the Congress is largely “self-serving” as the Delhi CM currently finds himself drowning in challenges, legal and political, and is in need of allies.

“If we allow AAP to grow, it will eventually try to swallow us. We shouldn’t forget the consequences Congress faced for extending support to Kejriwal for forming his first government in Delhi… we haven’t been able to win a single assembly seat in Delhi since that blunder. Do we really want to risk the same happening to us in Haryana or Gujarat in the future?” a senior Congress leader from Delhi said.

Ironically, among the leaders holding back-channel talks with AAP for the Haryana alliance is Ajay Maken, a veteran Delhi Congress leader who has been a trenchant Kejriwal critic since the failed 2013 experiment when the Congress extended outside support to enable the AAP to form its first government in Delhi. Since then, Maken has repeatedly asserted that the Congress must not ally with the AAP in Delhi.

Whether the AAP does finally strike a seat-sharing deal with the Congress for Haryana will, of course, depend on how beneficial Kejriwal thinks such an alliance would be for him and his party and also on the number of seats that the AAP is finally offered. Yet, Rahul’s alliance proposal has, for now, infused fresh intrigue in the Haryana poll battle.