LS polls: AAP, Cong to share seats in Delhi, Gujarat, Goa, Haryana; contest separately in Punjab

I have full confidence that each Congress worker will honour this decision and AAP workers will also follow this agreement, he said.After the announcement, Faisal Patel said in Ahmedabad that Congress workers were not happy with the decision to cede the Bharuch seat but added that he would abide by the decision of the Congress high command.Asserting he would meet the partys central leadership, Faisal said, There is still a lot of time for nomination and election.

The Aam Aadmi Party and the Congress Saturday sealed a seat-sharing deal for Lok Sabha seats in Delhi, Gujarat, Goa and Haryana but decided to contest separately in Punjab considering the ''special circumstances'' in the state.

After many rounds confabulations over the past several days, the two parties announced that the AAP will contest four seats in Delhi and the Congress three. ln Gujarat, the AAP will fight in two seats including Bharuch, from where Congress leader late Ahmed Patel had won thrice in the 1970s and 1980s. The Congress will field its candidates in the remaining 24 seats.

The decision to cede the Bharuch seat to the AAP did not go down well with Patel's two children with son Faisal saying he would meet the Congress's central leadership to take up the issue.

According to the agreed formula, the Congress will contest both the Lok Sabha seats in Goa and the lone seat in Chandigarh, Congress leader Mukul Wasnik said at a joint press conference. The AAP had earlier declared its Benaulim MLA Venzy Viegas as its candidate for the South Goa Lok Sabha seat, currently held by Congress's Francisco Sardinha.

In Haryana, the Congress will contest nine of the 10 Lok Sabha seats while the AAP will field its candidate in Kurukshetra, Wasnik said.

With this, the Congress has finalised its seat adjustments for 125 seats with INDIA bloc constituents, after it stuck an arrangement with Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh recently.

The battle lines for Lok Sabha polls in Delhi are now clearly drawn with AAP and Congress directly in fight with the BJP which won all the seven seats in the national capital in 2019.

AAP General Secretary (organisation) Sandeep Pathak said his party entered into an alliance with the Congress by sidelining its own political interests as it believes that the ''country is important and the party secondary''.

The BJP was quick to term this tie-up as an alliance of the ''corrupt'' and asserted that neither chemistry nor arithmetic favours the two parties against the NDA, the ruling combine led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The Congress, however, took a swipe at the NDA asking whether the BJP is held hostage by its alliance partners, as no seat-sharing formula has been declared by it yet.

Wasnik announced the AAP will contest in the Lok Sabha seats of New Delhi, West Delhi, South Delhi and East Delhi while his party will fight in Chandni Chowk, northeast Delhi and the northwest Delhi seats.

The BJP won all seven Lok Sabha seats in Delhi in the 2014 and 2019 general elections. In the last Lok Sabha polls, BJP candidates in each of the seats polled more votes than Congress and AAP candidates combined.

Senior AAP leaders and ministers Saurabh Bhardwaj and Atishi, Delhi Congress president Arvinder Singh Lovely and AICC in-charge of Delhi Deepak Babaria were also present at the press conference.

About Gujarat's Bharuch, Wasnik hoped that all Congress workers would respect the decision to give the seat to AAP.

''After taking into account all situations, we have decided this between the two parties. I have full confidence that each Congress worker will honour this decision and AAP workers will also follow this agreement,'' he said.

After the announcement, Faisal Patel said in Ahmedabad that Congress workers were not happy with the decision to cede the Bharuch seat but added that he would abide by the decision of the Congress high command.

Asserting he would meet the party's central leadership, Faisal said, ''There is still a lot of time for nomination and election. A lot of things can still happen. My father did a lot for the people of Bharuch. This is our seat. The workers and I are against this alliance but we will accept whatever the party say.'' Faisal earlier staked claim on Bharuch, saying he and ''conscientious'' Congress workers would not support the AAP candidate.

AAP's Chaitar Vasava will contest from Bharuch and Umeshbhai Makwana from Bhavnagar.

Ahmed Patel's daughter Mumtaz issued an apology on social media to Congress workers and asked them to regroup to strengthen the party.

On the decision regarding Punjab, AAP leader Pathak said, ''People are very intelligent and they understand everything.'' The campaign strategy of the INDIA bloc will be discussed at a later stage, he said and asserted that the tie-up will upset the ''calculations and strategy'' of the BJP.

Addressing a press conference in Panaji, the Congress's Goa unit president Amit Patkar and the AAP's state chief Amit Palekar asked all opposition parties in the coastal state to join hands to defeat the BJP in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections.

Currently, the South Goa seat is held by the Congress, while the North Goa seat is with the BJP.

Commenting on the seat-sharing agreement between the Congress and the AAP, BJP leader and Union minister Hardeep Puri said the most curious part of this ''dysfunctional'' alliance is that ''they will be together in Delhi, but against each other in Punjab''.

''The path to hell (or in this case political oblivion!) is paved with skewed alliances,'' he said in a post on X.

Union minister Meenakshi Lekhi and Delhi BJP chief Virendra Sachdeva claimed that in the states where the alliance matters -- be it Gujarat, Haryana, Chandigarh, Goa or the national capital -- the BJP had got well over 50 per cent votes in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.

Buoyed by the seat-sharing deals with the AAP and the Samajwadi Party, Congress general secretary K C Venugopal took a swipe at the BJP, which is yet to announce such an arrangement with its allies, asking whether the ruling party has been held ''hostage'' by the parties it sought to ''gobble up''.

He said that in the last week, the INDIA bloc has sealed important seat-sharing deals in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Delhi, Goa, Gujarat, Haryana and Chandigarh.

''Is the party which claims to win 400+ seats being held hostage by those parties it wanted to gobble up?'' he posed.

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)