Congress caught off guard as Akhilesh says gave 11 seats to party in UP, state chief says 'talks still on'

UP Congress president Ajay Rai however, said that the seat sharing talks were still on and that the Congress would announce the number of seats it would contest in the state and not the SP.

Lucknow: In a significant political development, which caught the Congress off guard ahead of the forthcoming Lok Sabha polls, Samajwadi Party (SP) president Akhilesh Yadav on Saturday announced that seat sharing had been finalised with the grand old party and that the latter would be contesting 11 Lok Sabha seats in the state.

As Akhilesh made the announcement on X (formerly Twitter), UP Congress president Ajay Rai said that no deal had been reached with the SP and that the seat sharing talks were continuing.

''The I.N.D.I.A alliance is off to a good start in UP with 11 seats for the Congress.....I.N.D.I.A and PDA (pichda, dalit, Muslims) will create history in the state,'' the SP president wrote in his message on Saturday.

Rai, however, said that the seat sharing talks were still on and that the Congress would announce the number of seats it would contest in the state and not the SP. ''We will announce it, not the SP,'' Rai said here.

According to the sources in the Congress, the party was taken aback by what some leaders termed a 'unilateral' announcement about the seat sharing and said that it could be ''pressure tactic'' adopted by the SP leader to force the Congress to accept the 11 seat offer. Congress had demanded 18-20 seats, sources said.

Furthermore, the LS seats being offered to the Congress included many 'tough' seats where the party stood very little chance of winning even with the SP support. Sources said that among the seats offered to the Congress were Amethi, Raebareli, Varanasi, Gorakhpur, Bansgaon, Jhansi, Kushinagar, Lucknow, Maharajganj, Prayagraj and Ghaziabad. Varanasi was represented by prime minister Narendra Modi while Gorakhpur was the hometown of UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath.

Akhilesh had earlier announced electoral tie up with the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD), which was a major electoral force in the 'Jat' dominated western Uttar Pradesh and gave it seven seats. Sources said that the RLD was likely to contest from Baghpat, Mathura, Amroha, Bijnore, Muzaffarnagar, Meerut and Kairana LS seats in the state in the forthcoming Parliamentary elections. Almost all the seats given to the RLD had a sizable presence of Muslim and Jat voters.

Sources said that the SP-RLD alliance could also accommodate firebrand dalit leader Chandrashekhar alias Ravan and leave a seat or two to him and his outfit, which commands considerable influence over the dalit community in the western districts of Saharanpur, Muzaffarnagar, Shamli, Meerut, Baghpat and some others.