UP polls: Bargaining chip or overreach? Why Congress is asking for so many seats

After weeks of rhetorical brinkmanship over who has the greater appeal among Uttar Pradesh voters, allies Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Congress party have finally begun negotiating seats for the upcoming Assembly polls. The talks, still at a nascent stage, however, have been no less stormy than the bitter war of words that the leaders of the two parties engaged in publicly in the past few weeks.

The Congress, which won a measly two seats in the 403-member UP assembly in 2022 with a pan-state vote share of 2.33 per cent, is learnt to have staked claim to over 175 constituencies, and has shared a list of these seats with the SP’s negotiators. The SP, on its part, has shot back with a demand of its own: asking the Congress to share “names of candidates instead of constituencies”, with party chief Akhilesh Yadav making it clear that “seats will be allocated only on the basis of a candidate’s winnability”.

A senior Lok Sabha MP of the SP who is privy to the ongoing talks told The Federal that Akhilesh is willing to concede “up to 85 seats” to the Congress but “only after they tell us who they plan to field in these constituencies and if we are convinced that their candidate can win”.

‘Alliance will remain united and win election’: Akhilesh

On Friday (October 23), Akhilesh confirmed that seat-sharing talks had begun and asserted that the “alliance will not only remain united but will also win the election”, but declined to comment on the visibly unreasonable demand for seats that the Congress, pushed to the fringes of UP’s electoral landscape over the past four decades, has made.

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“None of you knows. The person saying 172 seats thinks he has leaked the figure, similarly someone is saying 160 seats, someone 150 seats. No one knows the truth except us. Our collective goal is that the Congress party, the Samajwadi Party, the INDIA bloc gets strengthened and removes the BJP (from power) and for this, if we have to reason with anyone (about seat-sharing), we are prepared to do so and the alliance will move forward smoothly to defeat the BJP,” Akhilesh told reporters in Lucknow at the sidelines of a private event on Friday evening.

‘Congress’s irrational behaviour’

While the SP chief may publicly downplay differences with his ally over seat negotiations, another party leader told The Federal that Akhilesh has been “livid” over the Congress’s “irrational behaviour”.

“He doesn’t want any impression to go in the public that we are not united and so he is constantly making statements to diffuse the tension that some people from the Congress are trying to create due to their own vested political interests. Recently when Congress leaders like (Saharanpur MP) Imran Masood and their UP in-charge (Rajendra Pal Gautam) were constantly attacking the SP over seat-sharing and even saying that Akhilesh doesn’t matter in UP, only Rahul Gandhi does, Akhilesh called all our spokespersons and senior leaders and told them that we should not say anything that will damage the alliance even if the Congress attacks our party or even him,” the SP leader said.

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Masood, it may be recalled, has frequently been in the news over the past month for taunting Akhilesh and his party while Gautam has repeatedly claimed that the Congress wants “an equal share of seats” in the alliance. The latest powwow over the Congress’s demand for seats was also triggered by Gautam who told a news agency that his party had “submitted a list of 175 to 200 seats” to the SP’s emissaries two days ago.

‘Why make statements against SP and its top leaders?’

Congress sources claim that demanding a higher number of seats than what a party could realistically hope for is “usual negotiating tactic”. SP insiders, however, say their reservations are not so much with the demands that the Congress is making but with the manner in which its leaders have been issuing statements on a daily basis.

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“In negotiations, every party starts with an unreasonable demand and then the leaders work towards a consensus. Our problem is not that the Congress is asking for 50 per cent seats; even their leaders know how laughable this is, given the party’s performance in UP since the 1990s. Our objection is to the way they are going about with this business. Why do you have to make statements against SP and our top leaders every other day? If you think this will build pressure on our leadership, you are mistaken. The Congress should not forget that it is they who need the SP’s support to win even in Amethi and Rae Bareli (the traditional Nehru-Gandhi family seats, latter of which is currently represented by Rahul Gandhi),” said the Samajwadi Party MP quoted earlier.

Priyanka Gandhi’s role

SP sources say Akhilesh has told his party colleagues to “not pay any attention” to the statements being made by leaders like Masood and Gautam as he would, if needed, “speak directly with Rahul Gandhi, Mallikarjun Kharge, and Priyanka Gandhi” to sort out the seat-sharing hurdle. Congress insiders, however, claim that the list of constituencies Gautam sent to the SP was “vetted by Priyanka Gandhi”, who they claim is “supervising the negotiations from our side”.

Though Priyanka has cautioned her party colleagues to refrain from making any comments against the SP leadership in public, sources say she has also directed them to “ensure that Congress’s political interests are protected and we don’t give up seats where we have a good chance”.

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At Priyanka’s direction, the Congress, it is learnt, has segregated the 175-odd seats it is demanding from the SP into categories based on the prospect of winnability and organisational importance.

“There are about 50 constituencies we have marked as absolutely non-negotiable as these are our traditional seats where we have strong candidates, on another 30-odd seats we think we have a good chance because of the strength of the alliance and the caste combination in those seats; these are also seats where we feel that while the SP’s vote transfer can help our candidate win, the SP may not be able to win them if it fields its own candidate because of certain local factors, including caste and the party’s past record. The remaining seats are largely aspirational and we ourselves will not push too much for them when the negotiations really pick up pace,” explained an office-bearer of the Congress in UP.

Congress trying to rope in smaller political outfits

Congress sources say another reason for the visibly bloated seat expectations of the party are parallel negotiations that Gautam and the party’s UP unit leaders have been having with smaller political outfits to lasso them into the alliance. These outfits include Swami Prasad Maurya’s Apni Janta Party, Pallavi Patel’s Apna Dal (Kamerawadi), and Sanjay Chauhan’s Janvadi Socialist Party, among others.

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Maurya, Patel, and Chauhan, all backward caste leaders from eastern UP, were part of the Akhilesh-led SP alliance in 2022. After the SP’s poll loss, each of them severed ties with the SP over the next two years, but unlike Rashtriya Lok Dal chief Jayant Chaudhary and Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party chief OP Rajbhar, who switched sides from the SP-led coalition to the BJP-led NDA, these leaders remained unaffiliated with other formations.

Congress insiders claim the party is keen to rope Maurya, Patel, and Chauhan into the UP alliance again, and is aware that its push may not go down well with the SP, given the previous falling out. The Congress is, however, not averse to the idea of parting with seats from its share to these caste-based outfits as it feels doing so would help the party mark a larger presence in anti-incumbency prone eastern UP where it believes the BJP’s electoral slide is imminent.