Lok Sabha elections 2019: Congress delaying alliance, says AAP
On Saturday morning, the AAP called a press conference saying it would announce its “final decision” on the “Lok Sabha elections alliance”.
The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) Saturday criticised the Congress for “delaying” and “backtracking” on a possible alliance with it for the ongoing Lok Sabha elections even as it urged the party to reconsider its proposd seat-sharing pact.
On Saturday morning, the AAP called a press conference saying it would announce its “final decision” on the “Lok Sabha elections alliance”.
However, by the end of the press briefing senior party leader and Delhi deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia said, “Even though there is no official offer from the Congress on a fresh seat-sharing pact for Delhi and Chandigarh alone, we will see if anything of that sort comes our way. Alliances cannot happen at a press conferences.”
He did not comment further when asked about reports that a fresh 5-2 seat-sharing pact in Delhi (5 AAP and 2 Congress) was being discussed between the two parties.
When asked about the 4-3 seat-sharing proposal from the Congress in Delhi, Sisodia said that giving three seats to the Congress in the national capital would mean “giving three seats to the BJP”, adding that a Delhi-specific deal would not attract his party. The deputy CM also said that an alliance in Haryana, Delhi and Chandigarh would have been sealed had the Congress not “backtracked” on its “own offer” of 7-2-1 (7 Congress, 2 JJP and 1 AAP) for Haryana.
“Yesterday after detailed discussions, we somehow convinced our alliance partner in Haryana, the JJP, to agree to the new pact. Jannayak Janta Party (JJP) chief Dushyant Chautala even agreed to that, but then the Congress backtracked again on Friday night, saying there is no possibility of formation of any alliance anywhere except Delhi,” he said.
The AAP leaders said that while the Congress proposed 6-3-1 seat sharing formula to the AAP in Haryana where six seats would be for Congress, three for JJP and one seat for itself, the JJP had initially proposed 4-4-2 with four seats for Congress, four for JJP and two seats for AAP. The JJP offer was outrightly rejected by the Congress, they said.
Congress’s Delhi unit chief PC Chacko, however, said the talks of the alliance with AAP had always been about Delhi only.
On Friday, senior party leader Gopal Rai had said that the AAP postponed the nomination of its candidates in a last ditch effort to form an alliance with the Congress. “On Monday, AAP candidates would file their nominations along with South Delhi candidate Raghav Chadha, North East Delhi candidate Dilip Pandey and New Delhi candidate Brijesh Goyal,” Rai said.
