Congress, SP seat-sharing talks in Madhya Pradesh hit a dead end: Why INDIA allies failed to reach consensus

SP state president for Madhya Pradesh Ramayan Singh Patel told The Indian Express that “all possibilities of an alliance with the Congress are over”. “We had some talk with the Congress leadership, but it all fell through on Sunday. We will contest seats on our own and will do well in the elections next year,” he added.

A senior SP leader considered close to Akhilesh Yadav alleged that “the Congress is not interested in defeating the BJP”. The party functionary said, “We held talks with the Congress leadership but they didn’t seem interested in having an alliance to defeat the BJP. It seems their primary objective is to defeat the SP, not the BJP. Our alliance with the Congress will be for the Lok Sabha polls but in MP we will go alone. There were talks with the Congress leadership and we wanted 10 seats. They were offering fewer seats and suddenly they announced so many candidates without keeping us in the loop. This is not how an alliance works.”

The SP leader said the party would most likely field 30-35 candidates in total in Madhya Pradesh. What “hurt” the SP leadership, according to party insiders, is Bijawar, where the Congress decision to field Charan Singh Yadav seems to have irked it even more. Charan Singh is a cousin of Deep Narayan Yadav, a senior SP leader in Bundelkhand.

“It is hurtful that they have announced a candidate in a seat we won in 2018 and were preparing to contest. They didn’t consult us or talk to us and fielded their candidate,” said the SP functionary. Bijawar has a sizable Yadav and Brahmin population and in 2018 it went to SP’s Rajesh Kumar Shukla, also known as “Bablu Bhaiya”, who switched over to the BJP in 2020 after the Kamal Nath-led state government collapsed. The SP claims it is a seat where it will do well.

Madhya Pradesh Congress spokesperson Piyush Babele said the final call on seat sharing lay with the party’s high command. A Congress leader said the SP was trying to get more seats than it was capable of winning. “They don’t have a footing in MP. How are they expecting so many seats? And the seat they are upset about … Their MLA joined the BJP. Hopefully, something can be worked out but the SP needs to understand the ground realities in a state where they have no footing.”

Why SP is driving a hard bargain

Among the nine constituencies where the SP announced candidates on Sunday are: Sirmour, where former BJP MLA Laxman Tewari is its candidate; Niwari, where it has fielded former MLA Meera Deepak Yadav; Rajnagar, where Brijgopal Patel, also known as “Bablu Patel”, is the candidate; Bhander (reserved for Scheduled Castes), where retired district judge D R Rahul from the Ahirwar community is in the fray; and Sidhi (reserved for Scheduled Tribes) where Vishwanath Singh Markam is the SP nominee.

Last month, Akhilesh started his party’s Madhya Pradesh campaign with a public meeting in Sirmour. At an event in Lucknow on October 1, the SP president said he wants his party and the Congress to contest the state elections together to defeat the BJP.

In Chhattisgarh, which is also going to polls next month, the SP is considering contesting 40 of the state’s 90 constituencies. Party insiders said the objective of contesting these seats was to force a hard bargain in Uttar Pradesh, where it is strong, for the Lok Sabha elections.

On September 14, the 14-member coordination committee of the INDIA bloc met at Nationalist Congress Party president Sharad Pawar’s home in New Delhi to discuss how to begin seat-sharing talks. Even at the time, they knew that seat sharing was going to be tricky, especially in states such as Punjab, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal where members of the alliance are fierce rivals. The consensus was that there would be no across-the-board or uniform formula and the disparate parties appeared to be banking on their chemistry to get their arithmetic right.