No AAP-Congress Alliance?
New Delhi: An alliance between the AAP and Congress for the upcoming Haryana elections seemed unlikely on Monday afternoon after the AAP’s state unit chief, Sushil Gupta, declared that his party would contest all 90 seats on its own. This announcement came minutes after the AAP released its first list of 20 election candidates, with 11 of them vying for seats that the Congress had already allocated to its candidates.
Mr. Gupta also stated that a second list would be released soon. The AAP had been in a ‘wait and watch’ mode until last week, as talks with the Congress hit a roadblock. The two parties had reached an ‘in-principle’ agreement to re-form the alliance that had prevented the BJP from sweeping Haryana’s 10 Lok Sabha seats in the previous election.
However, working out a seat-sharing deal proved challenging. The AAP wanted at least 10 seats, but the Congress was only willing to concede seven, pointing out that the AAP had failed to win the seat allotted to it in the general election—Kurukshetra, which was won by the BJP’s Naveen Jindal.
Sources also mentioned that the AAP wanted seats in former Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda’s stronghold, which he was expecting to allocate to his loyalists. Mr. Hooda told NDTV last month that he had not spoken to the AAP’s state leaders since the general election and that the alliance was not state-specific.
“The alliance we had was at the national level. We have not spoken to them. Here the fight is between the BJP and Congress,” he said.
On Saturday, the Congress’s Deepak Babaria stated that his party would only offer a “small number” of seats. The AAP’s Raghav Chadha then spoke of a “desire, wish, and hope for an alliance” from both parties but warned that a deal may not happen “if there is no win-win situation…”
Talks over a possible alliance were encouraged by Congress MP Rahul Gandhi, who, according to sources, was aware that the opposition would need to unite once again to defeat the BJP, especially in a Hindi heartland state that the saffron party has dominated since 2014.
However, the AAP’s poor performance in the Lok Sabha election left the Congress with the upper hand in seat-sharing talks, a position emphasized by several state leaders who expressed concerns about allying with Mr. Kejriwal’s party in a state election.
The Congress’s position has also been strengthened by the signing of wrestlers Vinesh Phogat and Bajrang Punia, who have been leading protests against the sex assault-accused former wrestling body chief Brij Bhushan Singh. Ms. Phogat will contest the Julana seat while Mr. Punia will lead the party’s farmers’ support body.
