SP, Cong for seat sharing in UP

Political Bureau
Posted: Tuesday, Jan 13, 2009 at 0010 hrs IST
Updated: Tuesday, Jan 13, 2009 at 0010 hrs IST

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New Delhi: Unable to stitch an alliance in Uttar Pradesh, the Congress and Samajwadi Party are moving towards the second option — an electoral arrangement in which the two will attempt to contain the damage by not fielding candidates against each other in as many seats as possible out of the 81 Lok Sabha seats in the states.

The arrangement, while belying the bonhomie, which the two sides had exhibited during the trust vote in Parliament on July 22 last year, clearly is being arrived to avoid threat to at least some of the ‘‘certain’’ seats which both sides feel that they will win if they do not fight against each other.

That a proper alliance is unlikely to happen was evident when the SP on Monday announced names of five more constituencies, which it would contest, taking the total number of seats to 52 where it had already announced candidates. ‘‘With the declaration of three lists, the total seats announced by us stands at 52. But let me clarify that we have so far not touched any of the seats Congress had earmarked for itself,’’ SP general secretary Amar Singh said this afternoon. The seats announced by the SP included Gonda, Meerut, Pilibhit, Chandauli and Basti.

The Congress has announced so far that it will be fielding the nine sitting MPs in the state. Party circles on Monday indicated that besides the nine, it could field candidates in 4 seats where the party had come second in the last Lok Sabha elections besides another four or five constituencies where it had bettered the SP. It is these contentious seats, including Rampur, Farookhabad, Pratapgarh, Gonda, Fatehpur Sikri and Salempur, on which the two sides have not been able to reach any kind of agreement. Leaders from UP Congress hinted that the leadership would come out with their own counter to SP moves shortly.

Meanwhile, the SP also announced the formal joining of two former Congress leaders Mohammad Aslam Khan and Rajendra Yadav as well as the inclusion of former Indian high commissioner to Fiji Ajay Singh into the party whose term has ended recently.

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