The Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party have decided on a 4:3 seat-sharing arrangement for Delhi in order to jointly contest the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. A deal has also been reached for Goa, Chandigarh, Haryana, Gujarat, and Haryana.
The party led by Arvind Kejriwal is going to run for four of the seven seats in Delhi, namely West Delhi, South Delhi, East Delhi, and New Delhi. The final three, Chandni Chowk, North West Delhi, and North East Delhi, will attend the traditional celebration.
The BJP won each of the seven seats in the 2019 election.
AAP and Congress officials jointly announced the seat-sharing plan a few weeks after the opposition’s INDIA bloc secured their first electoral victory in the Chandigarh mayoral election.
Two seats in Gujarat, Bharuch and Bhavnagar, and one in Haryana, Kurukshetra, will be used by AAP for their contests. The Congress will contest one constituency in Chandigarh and both seats in Goa. Last week, the AAP announced its candidacy for South Goa, but it will now withdraw it to make room for its ally.
Due to the ambitions of the regional parties delaying the negotiations, seat-sharing has been one of the main headaches for the INDIA bloc. The recent electoral defeats suffered by the Congress in three heartland states have given the regional powers more confidence to pursue a larger percentage of seats.
Already, the Samajwadi Party of Akhilesh Yadav and the Congress have an agreement in place. The party will run for 17 of the 17 seats in Uttar Pradesh, the state with the most MPs in the Lok Sabha. In Maharashtra, the Congress and the Shiv Sena (UBT) are still at odds over eight seats, resulting in a standoff.
The Congress still faces opposition in West Bengal, where Trinamool declared yesterday that they would run for all 42 seats. According to sources, Trinamool is unwilling to give the Congress, which has been vying for at least five seats in the eastern state, more than two seats.
Two important members of the INDIA bloc, which was formed to oppose the BJP last year, have already left: Jayant Chaudhary’s Rashtra Lok Dal and Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal-United. They have both sided with the BJP.
