NEW DELHI: Ownership over the ‘cycle’ established, the heirs of the two most powerful political families of Uttar Pradesh — Akhilesh Yadav and Rahul Gandhi — are all set to tie their parties in an electoral alliance for the coming Assembly polls, in a day or two. Whether it will be a Bihar-like ‘grand alliance’ or just a three party tie-up, inclusive of Ajit Singh’s Rashtriya Lok Dal playing the junior partner, will depend on how fast Akhilesh can ride his cycle into the fray to clinch the seat-sharing talks.
If sources are to be believed, apart from the Congress, “hectic talks are on” with smaller outfits in the State, like the Apna Dal faction led by Union Minister Anupriya Patel’s mother Krishna Patel, the Peace Party chief Mohamed Ayub and a few others; as well as Nitish Kumar’s JD-U and Sharad Pawar’s NCP. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav, have both volunteered to campaign for Akhilesh’s ‘grand-alliance’ to keep the BJP at bay. In exchange, one or two seats may be given their parties, TMC and RJD, though they have apparently not made any demands.
As for the Congress, the seat-sharing talks have been held by Ghulam Nabi Azad and Priyanka Gandhi, with Prashant Kishor giving constituency-wise inputs, and Akhilesh and Ram Gopal Yadav on the other side. The Congress is likely to contest around 103 seats, the SP around 270-275 seats. Anything less than 100, Azad seems to have said during the negotiations, would be infra-dig for the GOP.
Particularly, since it had planned to contest all the 403 seats on its own and had even projected former Delhi CM Sheila Dikshit as the Chief Ministerial hopeful. (Dikshit has since rather gracefully bowed out, allowing the alliance to happen). As part of the strategy, SP may get to suggest candidates for 14 of the Congress’ 103 seats. What has really worked for the GOP is the informal agreement that 9-11 seats in the Amethi-Rae Bareli-Sultanpur belt would go to the Congress’ kitty.