NEW DELHI: An SP insider in Uttar Pradesh said, ‘Congress could get Ghaziabad and Khair Assembly seats. But they could lose both seats.’
Congress party, which is in alliance with the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh, is seeking five Assembly seats out of the 10 in bypolls which are expected to be conducted alongside Assembly elections in Maharashtra.
According to party insiders close to the leadership, there has been exchange of letters between the state unit president of Congress in Uttar Pradesh Ajay Rai, and Samajwadi Party leader Uday Veer Singh. Both the leaders have conveyed the seat count they are willing to contest and further, the SP leader had also conveyed that the party is not willing to give more than two seats to Congress.
A Samajwadi Party leader said, “Ajay Rai had sent a letter to which Uday Veer Singh had replied. They want us to have seats which we had won, and want to take all the remaining seats where they don’t have much presence. That, to anyone, would sound illogical, and I think when the time comes, all the things will be sorted between the top leadership and the alliance can go on smoothly.”
An MP from Samajwadi Party aware of the matter said, “There may not have been any serious negotiation about seat sharing with the Congress till now. But our leadership is not willing to give more than two Assembly seats.”
Other leaders think that the SP can extend the offer to three seats at most, as they think that Congress does not have much political standing to be given more than that.
An SP insider in Uttar Pradesh said, “Congress could get Ghaziabad and Khair Assembly seats. But they could lose both the seats. In Ghaziabad, Congress is not even in the contest.”
According to SP party insiders, the opposition alliance is sitting firm on five Assembly constituencies as they are considered to be the safe seats for the alliance, therefore, the focus could be to get hold of four more seats.
A party insider said, “The only seat we think is difficult for us to win is Ghaziabad Assembly constituency. It has been a stronghold of the saffron camp and they continue to be till date. There, we don’t see the it as a prospective seat.”
Earlier, five of these vacant seats were won by SP in 2022, while one seat was bagged by the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD), which was then in alliance with SP. BJP won three seats and one seat went into the account of BJP’s ally Nishad Party.
A political analyst in Uttar Pradesh said, “The bypoll is seen as a litmus test for the BJP, if they are able to retain the number of seats they had won earlier, they may be able to stand up straight. But even if they lose one seat, the opposition will start building pressure on them on the narrative front. BJP has complete majority in the house, it won’t matter to them though. But the loss would show the decline in the saffron camp’s popularity in the bypolls, as they lost more than 40 Lok Sabha seats. Therefore, BJP will plan it well and try to retain all their seats.”