After weeks of hard bargaining and long parleys, the Samajwadi Party (SP) and Congress reached a deal in Uttar Pradesh to contest the 2024 Lok Sabha elections together. The negotiations, which had started almost a month back, had hit a dead end as both sides were not ready to compromise. The poll alliance between two parties wavered for quite some time, before finally getting clinched on February 21. AICC general secretary Priyanka Gandhi reportedly played the ice-breaker and helped seal the deal before it reached a point of no return.
Out of total 80 seats, the Akhilesh Yadav-led SP allotted 17 seats to the grand old party and one to Chandrashekhar Azad’s party. The SP will field candidates on the rest of the 62 seats. The poll alliance between the two parties revives the memory of 2017 Assembly elections, when the “two boys” (Akhilesh Yadav and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi) joined hands to take on the BJP. But the alliance stitched for 2024 Lok Sabha elections looks more out of compulsion rather than a well-thought strategy to take on the might of the BJP.
In the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, the seats where Congress will contest include Rae Bareli, Amethi, Kanpur, Fatehpur Sikri, Bansgaon, Saharanpur, Prayagraj, Maharajgandj, Varanasi, Amroha, Jhnasi, Bulandshahr, Ghaziabad, Mathura, Sitapur, Barabanki and Deoria. Of the 17 seats, Varanasi is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s constituency while Congress does not have much to expect from its stronghold Amethi, owing to its ignorance and lack of attention.
A brief analysis of election figures show that the 17 seats of Congress are those, where it fared poorly in 2019 general elections. In 12 seats, the party even lost deposits and on one seat i.e. Bansgaon, it did not even field its candidate in 2019 elections. In the 2019 elections, the Congress contested on a total of 67 seats but lost deposits in about 63 seats, besides the humiliating defeat that it had to face in its pocket borough Amethi.
The seat-sharing talks in Uttar Pradesh are crucial for INDIA block parties in their goal to take on the BJP collectively in the Lok Sabha polls expected to take place in April-May this year. Uttar Pradesh sends 80 members to the Lok Sabha. The BJP has done well in the state in the last two Lok Sabha elections and the opposition parties are hoping that their coming together will help prevent division of anti-BJP votes. The BSP has said that it will fight the polls alone.
Despite the early hiccups, the Congress-Samajwadi Party seat-sharing deal has enthused the grassroots workers and gave an impetus to INDIA bloc’s prospects in the northern state, which sends largest numbers of lawmakers to the Lok Sabha. However, the past electoral records do not offer much hope. The INDIA bloc had already suffered many blows in the run-up to Parliamentary elections with many regional satraps declaring to go solo.
