If the INDIA alliance has any chance in the polls, they need to get their act together now because time is not on their side as the next general election is months away. The opposition alliance has still not made much headway on the all-important issue of seat sharing. This, along with several other issues, threatens to deepen the fault lines in the opposition camp. It doesn’t bode well that Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge said last Saturday that the INDIA alliance would meet in “10 to 15 days” to make decisions about key posts. Back in August 2023, when the opposition alliance leaders met in Mumbai, sources say several parties pushed for seat-sharing agreements to be finalised at the earliest.
Some were looking at a deadline of October end. But the Congress then went into assembly election mode and ignored it’s allies for three months. The stinging state election defeats in the Hindi heartland should have added more urgency to the exercise, but it has not.
INDIA leaders met in mid December and agreed that seat sharing needed to be finalised “as early as possible”. The Congress has only just started seat sharing talks with the SP, AAP, and the RJD. The only real forward movement has come in Maharashtra where reports suggest that the seat sharing has been planned out in detail among the MVA allies — the Congress, Shiv Sena and NCP. Importantly they are also including Prakash Ambedkar’s Vanchit Bahujan Aaghadi party in the Maha Vikas Aghadi.
Time to catch up
The JD (U) meanwhile is unhappy. They have been pushing to get their leader and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar made the convener of the INDIA bloc. The fact that this decision has been kicked down the road by the Congress has irked them. Speaking to the media, senior JD (U) leader and chief national spokesperson, KC Tyagi said “The way the Congress chief responded to media questions on Saturday on this (convener question) did not go down well with us. We are running out of time and ideas. We still have time to catch up. But it is Congress that has to show urgency to see a vibrant INDIA bloc”.
The trickiest states for seat sharing, apart from Bihar, will be Delhi, West Bengal, and Punjab. Mamata has made it clear she will not give the Congress more than 2 seats, which prompted state Congress chief Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury to hit back and say the Congress would not go begging for seats.
