Post 'note ban', SP and Congress restart negotiations for an alliance in UP polls

Sensing that Narendra Modi government’s ‘note ban’ is turning the tide against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on the ground, the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Congress have restarted their negotiations for a possible seat adjustment for the forthcoming Uttar Pradesh assembly polls.

The Uttar Pradesh assembly has 403 seats. According to sources, the SP has offered 58 of these to the Congress, which has turned down the offer as being paltry. The Congress wants to contest a minimum of the100 seats or a fourth of the total.

The news from Parliament is that opposition parties, particularly parties like Trinamool Congress that has locked horns with the Narendra Modi government, have urged the SP and Congress to continue negotiations. They argue that an SP and Congress alliance would not only defeat the BJP in Uttar Pradesh but also show the way to beat Modi in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

Earlier this month, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav had said that he was amenable to an alliance with the Congress. SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav is said to be averse to this. Congress state unit chief Raj Babbar has also recently ruled out any SP-Congress alliance.

But there are those within both parties who are of the view that they should come together to defeat the BJP. The Congress is being persuaded to settle for 70 to 80 seats. Those in the SP have argued that Ajit Singh’s Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) will also need to be accommodated in the alliance.

The Congress and the RLD had a seat adjustment in the 2012 assembly polls, in which the SP had won a simple majority of 224 seats. The Congress had won 28 and the RLD 9 seats. Nearly all of their victories were in western UP, where the SP isn’t as strong. While the SP is willing to allocate them seats where these two had won and ended runners up, but both want a more respectable seat adjustment.

An SP-Congress-RLD alliance could help this front consolidate the votes of Yadavs, Muslims and Jats — a winning combination. The SP and the Congress coming together could also prevent a split in the sizeable Muslim votes between the Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party and the SP.