Mumbai, September 13: Prospects of alliance between Congress and NCP in Maharashtra brightened with Sharad Pawar’s party expressing willingness to fight less number of seats than last time.
“We are willing to fight less number of seats than last time due to delimitation. We are for a fair and practical seat sharing, but are definitely not agreeable to contesting just 103 (of the 288) seats”, NCP General Secretary and Union Minister Praful Patel told a news agency.
NCP, he said, was hopeful that the Congress would continue the 10-year alliance for the Assembly polls in the larger interest of the state and to prevent communal forces from coming to power.
Patel’s statement came hours after Congress President Sonia Gandhi had separate meetings with senior Maharashtra leaders Vilasrao Deshmukh and Sushilkumar Shinde on the party’s poll preparations.
After the meetings, Congress has said it will take a decision on the alliance issue by Sunday.
Congress has so far kept the NCP on tenterhooks on the alliance issue asking Pawar’s party to accept “new ground realities” after it won 17 out of 26 seats it contested in the Lok Sabha polls in the state, more than double of the NCP’s tally of eight. NCP had contested 22 remaining Lok Sabha seats in the state.
In 2004, seats were distributed in proportion of 164 and 124 for Congress and NCP respectively.
Shinde, Chairman of the Congress Campaign Committee for Maharashtra, said Gandhi is expected to launch the Congress campaign in Mumbai around 25th September.
Replying to a question whether the party should tie up with Third Front, he said secular forces should be united in the elections to stop communal forces from coming to power.
Deshmukh, who was made head of the party’s election management committee in the state, said the party was preparing for all the seats. Deshmukh is a strong votary of the Congress going it alone in the elections.
Shinde maintained that the party was not projecting any chief ministerial candidate in the polls. “We are going to polls under the leadership of Chief Minister Ashok Chavan… but in our party no one is projected chief minister,” he said.
Both Shinde and Deshmukh are former Chief Ministers. The 2004 assembly polls were fought under Shinde’s leadership but Deshmukh became Chief Minister later. He quit following the 26/11 Mumbai terror strikes and Chavan took over.
The NCP, which has not done too well in the Lok Sabha elections, has been insisting that it wanted to contest the elections in alliance with Congress.
The AICC has been saying that NCP needed to accept “new ground realities” during seat-sharing and the state unit has pitched for renegotiation of the alliance focusing on new parameters for seat-sharing in the 288-member Assembly.
Congress and NCP are in power in Maharashtra for the last 10 years. While the two parties had contested separately in 1999 elections, they fought together in 2004.
—Agencies