The Chandigarh Mayor’s post may be with the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) for now but even better news for the INDIA alliance of Opposition parties on Tuesday was when the Delhi Chief Minister said that seat-sharing talks with the Congress for Delhi were in the final stages and a decision would be made “very soon”. Kejriwal’s statement came exactly a week after the AAP in a public snub to the Congress said the party did not deserve a single seat in Delhi based on merit and statistics but was being offered one “keeping in mind the alliance dharma”. AAP national general secretary Sandeep Pathak had blamed a considerable delay in finalising seat-sharing for his party's unilateral move. What the contours of a possible Delhi deal looks like is not yet clear and it has to be seen if the Congress or the AAP provide more clarity on Wednesday. The uphill battle that awaits any Opposition alliance in the national Capital cannot be understated — the BJP swept Delhi the last two times, winning all seven seats. But one thing that Kejriwal reiterated on Tuesday is that there will be no pre-poll agreement in Punjab, another state where the two parties are direct rivals and a lot of animosity exists between their state leaders. “Do not worry, that (contesting independently) is a strategy for victory," Kejriwal told reporters without elucidating further. Does it mean that the two parties will have some sort of a tacit understanding to ensure they do not eat into each other’s votes in the state? In context: With a couple of months to go for the Lok Sabha polls, the INDIA alliance has not been able to firm up either a seat-sharing agreement or a visible and coherent strategy on the ground. While there are signals here and there — like Kejriwal’s statement and Rahul Gandhi and Tejashwi Yadav coming together for a rally in Bihar — the big picture is that the alliance’s constituents are acting on their own on the ground and there is no agreement on how they will contest the elections together, if at all they do. While Congress MP Rahul Gandhi continues with his Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra in Uttar Pradesh, Tejashwi, the leader of the RJD, has embarked on his own statewide yatra in Bihar. Meanwhile, the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) alliance in Maharashtra is struggling to strike a seat-sharing pact because of disagreements over eight constituencies, as Alok Deshpande reported on Monday. There is no clarity either in UP, which is the most important of the big battlegrounds. The Samajwadi Party (SP) on Tuesday announced five more names for the Lok Sabha polls, taking the total number of candidates it has fielded to 32. This came a day after the party said it had offered 17 seats to the Congress, six more than its initial offer last month, and that Akhilesh Yadav would join Rahul in his yatra only after a breakthrough in talks. It is telling that it has been five days since the yatra has been in UP and there is no sign yet of the two heavyweights coming together on stage. Farmers' march and BJP's dilemma Days after talks with the government collapsed, farmers who have massed along the Punjab-Haryana border are scheduled to begin their march to Delhi at 11 am to press their demands, the biggest of which is a legal guarantee of Minimum Support Price (MSP) for all crops. But they are unlikely to make much headway given the heavy security build-up on the border. For the BJP, the march presents a conundrum given that Prime Minister Narendra Modi last year spoke of farmers as one of the four “biggest castes” that the government would have to uplift if the country had to develop. But now with a section of farmers clearly unhappy, the optics, at the very least, look bad for the ruling party in the run-up to the parliamentary polls. It has also got repercussions for the party in Punjab, one state in the north where it has not been able to expand. After initially maintaining silence, state BJP president Sunil Jakhar over the weekend cautioned the protesting farmers against being used as a political pawn by “so-called mediators”. It was a dig at Punjab CM Bhagwant Mann who has been trying to mediate between the Centre and the farm unions. Meanwhile, former Punjab CM Captain Amarinder Singh who during his tenure had allowed the farmers to proceed to Delhi during the 2020-’21 protests told Kanchan Vasdev in an interview that the Centre was “sympathetic towards the farmers” but the protesters would have to understand that the resolution would have to be “within the national perspective”. Recommended readings: Amarinder Singh interview How Modi government can give farmer MSP, and fulfil its goals Raisina Dialogue to begin The Raisina Dialogue, which is India’s flagship geopolitics conference, is set to begin in New Delhi on Wednesday. Prime Minister Narendra Modi will inaugurate the ninth edition of the conference, which will conclude on February 23. Greek PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis is the chief guest and will deliver the keynote address. The theme of this edition, according to the Ministry of External Affairs, is "Chaturanga: Conflict, Contest, Cooperate, Create”.
