Is the Samajwadi Party repeating the mistake of the 2017 assembly polls by allotting nearly a fourth of the 80 Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh to the Congress? Out of the 17 seats given by the SP now, the Congress lost deposits in 12 in 2019 and did not even contest on one of these constituencies, which it sought this time.
The allies announced the seat-sharing arrangement for the upcoming Lok Sabha polls in Lucknow on Wednesday, saying the SP will contest 62 seats, the Congress 17 and Chandrashekhar Azad’s party on one.
But the Congress did not even fight on one of these seats, Bansgaon, in 2019. It lost deposits in 12 out of these 17 seats at that time, escaping that ignominy but still losing in Amethi, Kanpur Nagar, and Saharanpur, and only bagging Raebareli. Out of the 67 seats that the Congress contested in UP in 2019, it lost its deposits in 63.
The Congress netted just 1% of the votes in Amroha, a seat that it will fight now under the arrangement with the SP. Danish Ali won the seat for the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), polling nearly 6 lakh votes, while the Congress candidate got just about 12,000. The buzz is that Ali may contest from Amroha on a Congress ticket this time after the BSP suspended him. Among other seats the Congress is contesting this time, it had netted merely 3.5% votes in Prayagraj in 2019, 2.62% in Bulandshahar, 2.5% in Mathura, 5.5% in Maharajganj, 5% in Deoria, and just 7% in Ghaziabad.
The last time these two parties were in an alliance in the state elections in 2017, the SP had allotted over 100 out of the 403 seats in the state to the Congress, which had only managed to win seven. In the 2022 state polls, the Congress further sunk to two assembly seats, polling just 6.36% votes.
Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, the general secretary incharge of UP during the 2019 and 2022 elections has been replaced by Avinash Pande. The seat-sharing talks hit turbulence before a patch-up on Wednesday.
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