NEW DELHI, 21 March 2004 — The Congress party and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) led by Sharad Pawar have announced their seat-sharing pact for Maharashtra yesterday. The Congress will fight on 26 of the 48 seats in Maharashtra while the NCP has got 18 seats. The Congress ally Republican Party of India has managed to get 3 seats while Janta Dal (Secular) has been given the remaining seat.
Both Congress and NCP have already announced candidates for several seats, NCP for 13 and the Congress has renominated most of its sitting MPs.
This announcement has come after five rounds of talks and nearly two months after Congress President Sonia Gandhi met NCP leader Sharad Pawar.
The two sides are, however, yet to firm up seat-sharing arrangements outside Maharashtra and the same is expected in the next few days. The NCP has been seeking seats in several other states, including Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Bihar and Rajasthan.
However, after the rebuff from BSP chief Mayawati, the Congress has again opened a formal channel of communication with the Samajwadi Party (SP).
Sources in the Samajwadi Party confirm that Mulayam Singh Yadav is also not averse to having a comprehensive dialogue on seat-sharing in Uttar Pradesh and elsewhere in the country.
A senior Congress leader said that both the parties were in touch at the highest level and the possibility of an understanding could not be ruled out even at this late hour. But other leaders denied knowledge of any formal negotiation, asserting that the party was preparing to fight alone.
The dominant view in the Congress is that the exercise was totally futile as the Samajwadi Party was not in a position to come to an accommodation with it for more than one reason.
But Yadav is under immense pressure from Muslim bodies to align with the Congress and hence he does not want to create an impression that he was sabotaging secular unity.
Some senior Congress leaders explain that Yadav was neither in a position to leave a respectable number of seats for them, nor was he likely to put his government in jeopardy by antagonizing the BJP.
But by going through the motions of a seat-sharing dialogue, he can water down the suspicions about his tacit understanding with the BJP to some extent, the Congress leaders say.
In fact, though the Congress is desperate to find a crutch in Uttar Pradesh after the BSP’s decision to go alone, it too has its share of problems in aligning with Yadav. While a strong lobby in the party is opposed to any understanding with Mulayam Singh, there are a large number of candidates who would not be willing to relinquish their claim on the seats of their choice.
“All these problems are there but in the larger interest of the party, a dialogue has been started. The BSP ditched us because it didn’t want to commit itself to either side to be able to join the ruling combine after the election. Now we are in tatters in UP and the SP-Congress combine will force the Muslims to desert the BSP. We will not only gain quite a lot but also disengage Yadav from the NDA by aligning with him,”a leader said.
