LUCKNOW: With the notification issued for the bypoll to nine assembly seats of Uttar Pradesh barring Milkipur which is caught in litigation, INDIA bloc partners - Congress and Samajwadi Party - have resumed seat-sharing talks.
The voting on nine assembly seats including Karhal, Katehari, Kundraki, Meerapur, Ghaziabad, Khair, Sisamau, Phulpur and Majhawan, will take place on November 13 and the results will be announced with the state assembly election results of Maharashtra and Jharkhand on November 23.
However, a final decision rests with the top brass of both the parties as SP chief Akhilesh Yadav and senior Congress leaders Rahul or Priyanka Gandhi will put their seal on the seat-sharing issue. As per the Uttar Pradesh Congress Committee (UPCC) chief Ajai Rai, the talks are on between the two partners. “We hope the matter will be finalized soon,” said Rai after the Election Commission announced the by-poll schedule on Tuesday.
While the Samajwadi Party had unilaterally announced its candidates on six of the 10 poll-bound seats on October 9, and seventh Sumbul Rana from Meerapur assembly segment on Thursday, the sources claimed that it may offer one or two remaining seats to Congress. On the other, the Congress party is concerned about getting fewer seats as it had staked claim to five of the 10 seats. Now in the given scenario, the Congress may have to be happy with just two.
However, even if given two seats, Congress will have nothing to lose as it did not have any sitting MLA on the 10 bypoll -bound seats. Currently, it has just two MLAs in UP assembly and if it manages to win even a single bypoll seat, its tally will go up.
In the 2022 UP assembly elections, the Congress’s best performance among the bypoll-bound seats was in Ghaziabad where it secured over 11,000 votes, while in most others it received fewer than 5,000 votes. Party leaders, however, believe the public mood has shifted in favour of the grand old party since the 2024 Lok Sabha elections given the responses to its Samvidhan Sabhas held in seven of those constituencies.
However, as per the political pundits, Congress’s performance in the Haryana and Jammu & Kashmir elections would have a bearing on its bargaining power with SP which now has an upper hand.