The INDIA bloc members have announced that the Congress will run for 17 of the 80 Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh in the upcoming Lok Sabha election, with the Samajwadi Party contesting the remaining 63 constituencies.
The opposition alliance, which was established in June with the goal of unseating Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party in the 2024 Lok Sabha election, has unveiled its first significant seat-sharing agreement.
The Congress will field candidates from Kanpur Nagar, Fatehpur Sikri, Basgaon, Saharanpur, Prayagraj, Maharajganj, Amroha, Jhansi, Bulandshahar, Ghaziabad, Mathura, Sitapur, Barabanki, and Deoria in addition to its strongholds of Raebareli and Amethi (both were defeated by the BJP’s Smriti Irani in 2019).
It has also been assigned Varanasi, the constituency of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
While this is going on, the Samajwadi Party will distribute seats to regional parties based on its share; however, Jayant Chaudhary’s Rashtriya Lok Dal is not anticipated to compete, as it is thought to have re-aligned with the BJP despite last month’s agreement to share seven seats with the SP.
Rajendra Chaudhary, the general secretary of the Samajwadi Party, and Avinash Pandey, the general secretary of the Congress, spoke at a press conference in Lucknow. The former issued a warning to the BJP, which has controlled the electoral landscape of Uttar Pradesh for the past ten years, winning 71 seats in 2014 and 62 in 2019.
The Congress-Samajwadi agreement was reached just one day after Akhilesh Yadav threatened to boycott Rahul Gandhi’s “Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra” unless the national party completed talks.
The past few days have seen a close examination of talks between the two, which are seen as a gauge of INDIA’s capacity to mount a persistent challenge to the BJP’s formidable poll-winning apparatus. This is especially true in light of the Congress-AAP’s historic victory in the Chandigarh mayoral election.
But up until yesterday, it didn’t seem like an agreement could be reached. At that point, Sonia Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra intervened.
According to sources close to the Congress party, Sonia Gandhi played a crucial role in helping state leaders realize that some of their demands were “unrealistic” in light of the party’s appalling results in the polls in 2014 and 2019.
The announcement is a major encouragement to the coalition, which has had difficulty staying together since its founding in June of last year and has conflicts over seat-sharing at the top of its list of issues to be resolved.
Nitish Kumar, the leader of the Janata Dal (United) and the chief minister of Bihar, has already left the group.
Bengal’s ruling Trinamool Congress said that it would run for the 42 Lok Sabha seats on its own, following the Congress’s Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury’s incessant criticism of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.
The Congress and the AAP have failed to reach an agreement on seat sharing in Punjab, where the AAP defeated the Congress in the previous election. However, it is hoped that the victory in the mayoral race will have a favorable effect.
