In Hindi heartland states of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, the Congress and Samajwadi Party Wednesday officially announced their tie-up for the for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections.

Lok Sabha Polls: The Congress is rapidly attempting to close any cracks in the the INDIA bloc ahead of the upcoming Lok Sabha elections by negotiating seat-sharing deals with alliance partners in hopes of getting every member in the opposition grouping on the same page as polls draw near.

In Hindi heartland states of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, the Congress and Samajwadi Party Wednesday officially announced their tie-up for the for the forthcoming general elections with UP’s main opposition party leaving 17 out of the 80 seats in the state for the ally.

Meanwhile, in MP, the Samajwadi Party will contest on a single seat, Khajuraho, and support the Congress in the remaining constituencies in the state.

Congress to contest 17 seats in UP

At a joint-press conference in Lucknow, SP state chief Naresh Uttam Patel, SP national general secretary Rajendra Chaudhary, Congress state president Ajay Rai and AICC in-charge of UP Avinash Pande, made the seat-sharing announcement public.

Pande said the Congress will contest on 17 seats, while on the rest of the 63 seats in the state, the SP and other alliance partners will contest.

“The Congress will contest on 17 seats in UP and on the rest of the 63 seats, Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav will decide candidates,” said SP state president Patel.

Apart from Raebareli, Amethi and Varanasi, the other seats on which the Congress will be contesting included Kanpur City, Fatehpur Sekri, Basgaon, Saharanpur, Prayagraj, Maharajganj, Amroha, Jhansi, Bulandshahr, Ghaziabad, Mathura, Sitapur, Barabanki and Deoria, Patel said.

Sonia Gandhi is presently MP of Raebareli while Rahul Gandhi lost his Amethi seat to BJP leader Smriti Irani in 2019 polls.

SP-Congress alliance

Earlier today, Akhilesh Yadav announced that an alliance between Congress and Samajwadi Party has been formalized for Lok Sabha polls in Uttar Pradesh.

Earlier, the SP had said that Yadav would only join the Rahul Gandhi-led Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra only if its seat-sharing proposal for the polls is accepted. The former Uttar Pradesh chief minister did not
join the yatra in Raebareli on Tuesday.

However, after the announcement of the SP-Congress alliance, it’s now speculated that Yadav would join the yatra in Agra after the seat sharing deal is announced.

Notably, it’s been reported that the Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra played a key role in mending ties between the alliance partners and it was her phone call to SP chief Akhilesh Yadav which led to the breaking of the deadlock over seat-sharing talks between the two parties in UP and resulted in stitching of the key alliance.

(With PTI inputs)