The display of congeniality notwithstanding, alliance talks between the Congress and the NCP for the Maharashtra Assembly polls continues to hang in the balance with neither side willing to show any sign of accomodation and accept seat-sharing formulation suggested by each other.
That the negotiations were yet to take a decisive turn was evident on Monday when Congress president Sonia Gandhi made her way to Mumbai to kickoff her party?s poll campaign in the state even as NCP chief Sharad Pawar chose to stay behind in New Delhi. It was just two months ago that the duo had travelled together to Mumbai to inaugurate the Bandra-Worli sea link that was named after Rajiv Gandhi on the suggestion of the NCP chief.
Pawar on Monday made it clear that he was not going to blink when he said he was not meeting any Congress leader in the next couple of days as he was busy with his own work. ?I am not scheduled to meet anybody (Congress leaders) today or tomorrow knowing full well about my commitments? he said. Sonia also did not any references to the alliance with the NCP in Mumbai even as she inaugurated the MRCC office, only saying that the Congress will emerge victorious in Maharashtra once again.
The two sides are yet to reach at an agreeable formula in the face of Congress contending that the NCP significantly pare down its demand in the wake of the new ground situation, that was demonstrated by the Lok Sabha results. The Congress had won 17 out of the 25 seats it contested in the state with 48 Lok Sabha constituencies, while the NCP was able to win only eight out of 21 seats it fought. Pawar, however, knows that giving in to Congress pressures at this juncture will only lead to slow death of his party in the long run.
The NCP leader does not want to deviate from the formula arrived in 2004, where the Congress contested on 154 out of the 288 seats, while the NCP fielded candidates in 127 seats. Civil aviation minister Praful Patel, a close associate of Pawar, has been on record to say that the NCP will not settle for anything less than 124 seats though the assessment is that it could ultimately settle for anything between 115 and 120 seats. Besides the numbers, the two sides will also face difficulty over specific constituencies, particularly winnable ones, that neither side will want to give to the other. In 2004, it was Pawar who had got the better of the Congress, when he fielded independents and Congress rebels in contentious seats leading to his party winning more seats than the Congress in the overall. Even as it is wary of a similar tactic, the Congress is not willing to give more than 110 seats to the NCP.
The NCP has made it clear that it will not play ball, threatening to contest alone if a respectable arrangement is not arrived at. Even while he has maintained that he would not like the alliance to break for a few seats, Pawar has hinted that he has candidates ready for all the 36 seats in the Mumbai region, that will damage the NCP-Congress most and give a walkover to the BJP-Shiv Sena.