New Delhi: Ending speculations about the future of the INDIA alliance, the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on February 24 announced seat-sharing for Gujarat, Haryana, Delhi, Goa and Chandigarh in the run up of the upcoming general election — which is expected to be notified in March.
The two parties have decided to go solo in Punjab where the AAP is in power and the Congress serves as the principal Opposition.
Of the seven Lok Sabha constituencies in Delhi, the ruling AAP will contest on four (East, West, South and New Delhi districts) seats, while the grand old party will contest three seats: North West Delhi, North East Delhi and Chandni Chowk.
In Gujarat, which has 26 Lok Sabha seats, the Congress (the Opposition of the incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP) will run for 24 and the AAP for two — including Bhavnagar and Bharuch.
The Congress will contest nine of the 10 seats in BJP-ruled Haryana (where it is serving as the Opposition in the Assembly), while the AAP will contest one seat (Kurukshetra).
For Chandigarh, a union territory, several rounds of negotiations took place between the two parties. Ultimately, it was decided that a Congress candidate would run for this seat.
Talks about Goa were also held, and it was decided that the Congress will contest both seats of the state.
The two parties have chosen to contest Punjab’s 13 Lok Sabha seats independently. The AAP had already announced earlier that it would not enter into an alliance with the Congress in the state for Lok Sabha polls.
The announcement of the seat-sharing arrangement follows AAP’s allegations — made in two separate press conferences on February 22 and 23 — that if the Arvind Kejriwal-led party allies with the Congress ahead of the elections, the BJP-led Union government would get the Delhi chief minister arrested by its agencies such as the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).
Kejriwal has already skipped six summons served by the ED for questioning in the excise policy-linked money laundering case. The agency has issued him a seventh summon to appear before it on February 26.
Congress’s National Alliance Committee Convenor Mukul Wasnik at a joint press conference attended by AAP MP Sandeep Pathak and MLAs Saurabh Bharadwaj and Atishi in the national capital on February 24 stated the BJP’s pressure techniques are not only limited to the AAP and Kejriwal.
“This is not exclusive to the AAP or Arvind Kejriwal. These tactics include using the CBI, the ED and the Income Tax against everyone to put pressure on them. The BJP is engaging in politics that is threatening Indian democracy, and it will be opposed by the country’s citizens as well as the Congress and the AAP,” he said.
Addressing the joint news conference, Pathak stated the “intention of this alliance is that it is the country which is important, party is always secondary”. “Therefore, the two parties have put aside their political differences and united for the good of the country,” he said.
He further said the alliance does not mean that the Congress will fight this election from here and the AAP will fight from there.
“It is INDIA, which will contest the upcoming election. The Congress is fielding candidates on certain seats, while the AAP is running for other seats. With this partnership, I think, the BJP’s calculations will be reversed; and we will fight and prevail in the elections with the support of the citizens of the country,” he added.
Only a few weeks have passed since the AAP threw down the gauntlet earlier this month, offering the Congress just one seat in the capital while claiming it does not “deserve a single seat on merit”. This is when the final form of the seat-sharing agreements took shape.
The Congress’s national leadership acknowledged that the negotiations over seat sharing had stalled, but the party’s Delhi wing declared that it is “energised” to contest all seven of the national capital’s seats.
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