Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) state president Bhaskar Jadhav has reiterated that the party will not settle for less than 22 Lok Sabha seats in its alliance with the Congress, but fight the forthcoming polls on its own.
Bhaskar Jadhav, the party’s state unit president, told journalists on Tuesday that ideally the two parties should have sat together to decide the sharing of seats. “We would like to ask them how they arrived at the number of 29 and 19. But if they float these numbers in the newspapers instead of sitting and discussing, we will not accept this,” Jadhav said. “If the Congress is so confident about winning from all the 48 constituencies, we wish them good luck.”
In the last Lok Sabha elections, the Congress contested from 26 constituencies and the NCP from 22. Only a couple of days ago, NCP leader and deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar had said that the formula agreed in the last general elections would continue.
Jadhav said, “It is just that we do not want division of votes. There are allegations of corruption against the UPA government, especially against Congress ministers. In this scenario there should not be any confusion among voters or division of secular votes. Therefore, we want the alliance to stay intact.”
The NCP state chief explained that this matter was discussed at a co-ordination committee meeting of the alliance last month and that the NCP had made its position clear.
“In fact, (NCP leader) Praful Patel told the Congress leaders that even the Congress high command had agreed to the ratio. But Congress leaders attending the meeting said that the high command had not conveyed any agreement with the NCP to them. So Patel told them to communicate with the high command and get back to the NCP so that candidates for the constituencies could be declared soon,” Jadhav said.
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