MUMBAI: Even as the Congress is dithering on forging an alliance with the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and thinking of going solo for the forthcoming polls to the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly, hard-line Hindu parties Shiv Sena and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) reached an agreement on Tuesday to contest all 288 Assembly seats on a joint platform.
As per the deal, the Sena will contest 171 seats and the BJP 117 seats. In metropolitan Mumbai, the Sena will contest 21 seats while the BJP will field candidates in 15 constituencies.
The 10-year-old Congress-NCP coalition may have easily sailed through the Lok Sabha elections, but this time conditions may not prove easy for the Democratic Front government, which faces a number of major hurdles ahead of the Assembly polls.
Two of the key factors that pose problems for the alliance are the emergence of the Republican Left Democratic Front (RLDF) and the Shiv Sena-BJP saffron alliance, which is in a position to declare its candidates well before the ruling coalition.
Meanwhile, Uddhav Thackeray, the working president of Sena, said his father and Sena supremo Bal Thackeray was in good health and that he has expressed his wish to actively campaign for the Sena-BJP candidates in the Assembly polls. He however said that the timetable of his joining the campaign would be announced in due course.
Uddhav was optimistic that the Sena-BJP combine would emerge victorious in the Assembly polls and that the Sena chief would grace the celebrations. He refuted media reports that there were differences between the alliance partners over the seat-sharing formula, saying relations between the two parties were "very cordial."
In another development, Supriya Sule, Member of Parliament from Baramati and daughter of NCP chief Sharad Pawar, laid to rest all speculations that she harbored a strong ambition of getting into the Maharashtra chief minister's office in the near future.
"I have no plans of coming down to state politics, as I am very happy with my current stint in Parliament," she said.
