Clearly anxious to expedite the process of sewing up pre-poll alliances with prospective partners, the Congress on Tuesday signalled at a March 5 ultimatum to seal them and decided to begin the process of selecting candidates for the Lok Sabha elections the next day onwards.
The self-imposed deadline, decided at a meeting that Congress president Sonia Gandhi had on Tuesday with party general secretaries, comes in the backdrop of the stalemate in alliance talks with Samajwadi Party in UP as well as the sudden freeze that has enveloped the potential tie-up with Trinamool Congress in West Bengal. Congress-TC relations flared up earlier this week after senior leader Pranab Mukherjee, in the company of West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, indirectly criticised Mamata Banerjee for posing hurdles in the state?s development. On the other hand, alliance talks with the SP have swung from one extreme to the other, but failed to yield any concrete results so far.
Tuesday?s meeting of the Congress leadership essentially characterised alliance talks at three different levels?retaining present allies of the UPA such as the NCP and the RJD, sewing new tie-ups like those with the SP and Trinamool and also dropping existing partners in some states. Part of the Congress strategy is likely to be outlined by Gandhi at a meeting of the Congress parliamentary party on Wednesday, where she will also give directions to cadres on the party agenda and policies.
Gandhi has also set up smaller sub-committees or groups, which include prominent leaders of each state and general secretaries in charge to hold talks with UPA partners. Interestingly, RJD chief Lalu Prasad on Tuesday also asserted that the UPA would fight the elections together in Bihar but ruled out conceding more than 13 states to the two collectively. ??We will sit together and discuss. If they don?t agree then all will contest…but I want that we contest together,?? he said. In the last Lok Sabha polls, RJD took the chunk of 26 candidates with LJP getting eight, Congress four seats and NCP fielding candidate in one constituency.
Alliance talks with the NCP in Maharashtra too is yet to be finalised with Sharad Pawar trying to pressurise Congress into giving his party more seats. The Congress is insisting on a repeat of the earlier formula in which it had contested in 27 out of the 48 seats in the state. Tamil Nadu presents an even more complicated case with AIADMK chief Jayalalithaa extending an alliance offer to the Congress, which has found a positive response amongst Congress MPs and MLAs from the state. The leadership, however, does not seem eager to dump the DMK as of now.
The only seat-sharing arrangement that has been finalised so far is with the National Conference in Jammu and Kashmir, where the two parties will put up three candidates each in the six Lok Sabha constituencies in the state. This obviously means that the PDP will be out of the UPA in the polls.
