A week after the Congress faced scathing criticism from its allies in the INDIA alliance for not taking some of them along in the Haryana Assembly elections, Samajwadi Party (SP) president Akhilesh Yadav will arrive in Maharashtra on Friday to launch his party’s campaign and discuss seat-sharing with the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA).
Akhilesh’s visit comes at a time when the MVA has finalised an agreement for 260 of the 288 Assembly seats in Maharashtra and is likely to finalise a deal in the next two days. After a meeting of the alliance on Thursday, the Leader of the Opposition in the state Assembly, Vijay Wadettiwar of the Congress, said there was consensus on 260 seats.
A source said seat sharing for the 36 Assembly constituencies in Maharashtra had been sealed. “As per the preliminary formula of Mumbai’s 36 seats, Sena (UBT) is likely to contest 18 seats, Congress 15-17 seats, and the remaining will go to the NCP (SP) and smaller allies,” the source added.
The SP has shared a list of 12 seats with the MVA that consists of the Congress, the Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar), and the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray). Sources said Akhilesh might meet top leaders of the Shiv Sena (UBT) and the NCP (SP) to discuss seat-sharing. He will also meet local SP leaders about poll preparations.
Akhilesh told reporters in Lucknow on Thursday, “I am going to Maharashtra tomorrow (Friday). Our effort will be to contest with the INDIA bloc. We have demanded seats and we are hopeful that where we have two MLAs, we will get more seats and we will stand with the alliance.” Yadav is scheduled to address a public meeting in Malegaon on Friday and in Dhule the next day.
SP leaders hope that contesting the Maharashtra elections with the Opposition bloc would help avoid a division of votes and also boost its chances of attaining the status of national party. The SP has shown an interest in contesting from Raver in Jalgaon district and Amravati, citing “large minority presence” and “strong anti-incumbency”. Both these constituencies have Congress MLAs. The other seats that the SP wants are Mankhurd Shivaji Nagar, Versova, and Anushakti Nagar (Mumbai Suburban district), Byculla (Mumbai City), Bhiwandi East and Bhiwandi West (Thane), Malegaon Central (Nashik), Aurangabad East (Chhatrapati Sambhaji Nagar), Karanja (Washim), and Dhule City (Dhule district). The undivided NCP won Anushakti Nagar in 2019.
Of these seats, the SP currently represents Mankhurd Shivaji Nagar whose MLA is its state president Abu Azmi and Bhiwandi East whose MLA is Rais Shaikh. Azmi told The Indian Express that SP had decided its candidates for Malegaon Central — former Malegaon Central MLA MLA Nihal Ahmed’s daughter and Malegaon Municipal Corporation’s Leader of Opposition Shan-e-Hind — and Dhule City, both of which have AIMIM MLAs at present.
“The MVA’s meetings are going on but the meetings of smaller parties are pending. I am asking for 12 seats … Congress cannot win in Bhiwandi but we can. If we do not get the seats where we are strong, then we will be forced to field our candidates there,” Azmi told reporters on Thursday.
The SP leader said the Congress should take the SP into confidence before releasing its list of candidates and urged that a decision on -sharing be taken at the earliest. On Wednesday, he had posted on X that it would be wrong for any of the MVA parties to release the list “without talking to the SP”.
“We will complete the seat-sharing discussion in two days. We will also discuss giving seats to the SP. Like the agreement happened in UP with SP, the same will happen in Maharashtra too,” Wadettiwar said on Thursday.
Last week, a day after the Congress lost the Haryana election, the SP named six candidates for Assembly bypolls in Uttar Pradesh, with a party leader telling The Indian Express, “They did not give us a single seat in Haryana when there is a sizable Ahirwal (Yadav) population in the state. The Congress is weakening the INDIA bloc by being so rigid. They want seats in UP where they managed to win two seats in the 2022 Assembly elections when the Congress contested 403 seats. We gave them 17 seats in the Lok Sabha elections because our main goal is to take everyone along and defeat the BJP. The Congress does the opposite.”
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