The Congress is likely to get three of the seven seats in Delhi for the upcoming Lok Sabha election as talks with the AAP have reached the final round, sources said. The AAP, which is in power in Delhi, is likely to contest the remaining four seats.
Earlier this week, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal said the seat-sharing agreement between the two parties had reached the “final stage” even though he lamented that the discussions were “much delayed”.
“Let’s see what happens in the next two to three days. It has been delayed a lot, it should have happened earlier,” Kejriwal told reporters.
The BJP won all the seven seats in Delhi in 2014 and 2019. In 2019, the BJP’s vote share in all seven seats was over 50 per cent.
Initially, the AAP had offered the Congress party just one of the seven Lok Sabha seats in Delhi, escalating tensions between the two alliance partners.
“On merit basis, the Congress party does not deserve even a single seat in Delhi, but keeping in mind the ‘dharma of alliance’, we are offering them one seat in Delhi. We propose the Congress party fight on one seat and AAP on six seats,” AAP MP Sandeep Pathak had said last week.
Tension between the two parties escalated after the AAP declared that it would contest all the 14 Lok Sabha seats in Punjab and Chandigarh alone. The AAP has also unilaterally declared its decision on contesting three seats in Assam and two seats in Gujarat.
The development comes a day after the Congress and Samajwadi Party finalised their seat-sharing deal in Uttar Pradesh. While the Congress will contest 17 Lok Sabha seats, the remaining 63 seats will be for Akhilesh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party (SP) and other alliance partners of the INDIA bloc.