After Haryana loss, Congress cedes more space to INDIA allies

Wednesday and Thursday were interesting days for the Congress, which seemed to agree to contest the same number of seats as its allies in Maharashtra — there are still some open seats, though — and decided to leave the field clear for its ally Samajwadi Party in the Uttar Pradesh assembly by-elections.
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The origin of these events goes back to October 8 , when results to the Haryana and Jammu & Kashmir assemblies were declared. The Congress lost the first , which it was widely expected to win, and, while part of the victorious grouping in the second, didn’t do well in that either. The result: uncertainty within, and pressure from allies.
Uttar Pradesh presents a case in point. While there was a broad understanding ahead of the general elections that the alliance would fight together in all states, getting five out of 10 seats in the Haryana Lok Sabha polls, made the Congress go back on its word when assembly elections in the state were declared. Confident of winning Haryana, the party is believed to have dismissed SP’s demands for some seats in the state. This, HT learns, made the UP talks go cold. When they resumed after the Haryana results, the discussions from the Congress side were managed by Priyanka Gandhi Vadra and Avinash Pandey. The Congress demanded 4 out of 9 seats to begin with. The SP wanted to share a maximum of three seats. The numbers were not all that far apart, but the problem was in the choice of seats.
SP leaders deny that the party acted tough with the Congress after the Haryana results. “They made an emotional pitch for the Phulpur seat (in Allahabad where the Gandhi family has roots) and so we told them right from the beginning that they could have that seat,’’ said an SP leader who is aware of the details, speaking on condition of anonymity. The second seat which was offered was Khair in Aligarh but the seat that the talks fell apart on was Ghaziabad, a BJP stronghold which the Congress refused to contest. With talks dragging on, the SP announced candidated on all seats but said it was open to accommodating the Congress.
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Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi and Akhilesh Yadav spoke twice to sort out the differences, the last one being on Wednesday night where Yadav again urged Gandhi to not give up on the seats being offered. The SP chief reminded Gandhi that he was reluctant about fighting in Rae Bareli too, but Yadav had pushed him and it led to an astonishing win with a sizeable margin. Yadav explained that the only reason SP had announced its candidates even from Phulpur was that the Congress was delaying the talks.
HT learns that while Gandhi left the conversation open ended, Pandey called the SP leaders later to say that the party had decided to not contest at all. The argument was that getting SP to withdraw a Muslim candidate Mujtaba Siddiqui from Phulpur to make way for the Congress would send a wrong signal in a seat with a sizeable Muslim presence. And so, the Congress said, it would simply play a supporting role in Uttar Pradesh. The SP is hoping that the two can arrive at an understanding in Maharashtra, where around 15 seats have been kept aside for smaller allies of the MVA, including the SP and the Aam Aadmi Party.
Maharashtra presenta another problem for the Congress, though. After the Maha Vikas Aghadi(MVA)’s press conference on Wednesday, state Congress leaders such as Nana Patole and Balasahab Thorat are facing some internal pushback for their curious announcement of an equal sharing of the 288 seats.
“It cannot be less than 105 seats for us,’’ said a senior Congress leader who asked not to be named, pointing out that this equal arrangement still accounted for only 255 out of 288 seats, which left 33 seats unaccounted. The leader admitted that Haryana had made things rough for them in the past few weeks. The Thackerays delegated the bargaining to their feisty MP Sanjay Raut, while they spent their time campaigning. And so, the Congress, which won the most seats in the state (13) ended up going back and forth, trying to accommodate an aggressive Shiv Sena (UBT’s) demands. Their biggest leaders in the state, Nana Patole and Balasahab Thorat, were scrambling from one MVA meeting to another and from Delhi to Maharashtra, instead of focussing on their seats and their candidates. Patole, the Congress leader said, got the allies’ hackles up when he started the bargaining with 170 out of 288 seats.
While analysts believe that the Congress contesting fewer seats is not such a bad thing — they point to the party’s poor performance in recent state elections, including Haryana — party insiders are confident that the MVA can repeat its Lok Sabha performance and win the state. Doing that in Maharashtra, and helping the SP set the tone for the 2027 assembly elections in the state is more important than establishing the party’s primacy in the coalition, the analysts added.