New Delhi: Former Congress chief Rahul Gandhi and incumbent party president Mallikarjun Kharge will on August 16 take a hard look at seat sharing for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections with Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Delhi. “Yes, we are most likely meeting the party chief tomorrow,” All India Congress Committee (AICC) in-charge of Delhi Dipak Babaria told ETV Bharat.
The review meeting assumes significance as it comes just two weeks ahead of the next opposition alliance INDIA meeting in Mumbai on August 31 and September 1 where around 26 parties will discuss the national-level seat-sharing plan for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
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The challenge for the Congress high command is to find a middle ground between the two extreme situations. The high command desires to take forward the national alliance INDIA to take on the BJP in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls but it is also aware of the strong views of the party’s Delhi unit leaders who are against having any poll pact with the AAP.
On May 29, Mallikarjun Kharge held a strategy session with senior Delhi leaders like JP Agarwal, Ajay Maken, Devender Yadav, Anil Chaudhary, Arvinder Singh Lovely and Haroon Yusuf, who opposed having any alliance with the AAP. Though the meeting had been called to discuss whether Congress should oppose the controversial Delhi ordinance related to the posting of officers during the recently concluded Monsoon session of Parliament, the leaders also shared their views about the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
Former Punjab unit chief Navjot Singh Sidhu, who had also attended the May 29 meeting, too had told the same thing to Kharge. Later, Punjab Congress Chief Amarinder Singh Raja Warring and Congress Legislative Party Leader Partap Singh Bajwa held separate meetings with Kharge to oppose any pre-poll alliance with the AAP. Both Warring and Bajwa have been publicly criticising AAP founder and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal.
However, during the recently concluded Monsoon session of Parliament, Congress supported the AAP by opposing the Delhi ordinance which the Narendra Modi government managed to get passed in both the Houses. The grand old party was so eager to display its Opposition to the Delhi ordinance that it even asked 90-year-old former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to be present in the Rajya Sabha during the voting despite his ill health.
Articulating the sentiment shared by many within the party, former Delhi MP Sandeep Dikshit had publicly stated that the Congress should not have opposed the Delhi ordinance, which Arvind Kejriwal was playing up to push his politics. Ajay Maken too had stated that the Congress kept the BJP at bay in Delhi in the Lok Sabha polls but the saffron party started winning seats only after AAP came to power in the national capital.
On his part, Kejriwal wrote separate letters to both Rahul Gandhi and Mallikarjun Kharge thanking them for supporting his party over the Delhi ordinance. Congress insiders said that was the easy part but the real challenge for the high command would be to deal with the strong views of its Delhi and Punjab leaders over having any truck with the AAP, which has grown in the two states by eating into the traditional votes of the grand old party.
Ahead of Rahul Gandhi's review, AICC in-charge Babaria discussed the seat-sharing issue threadbare with the senior Delhi leaders. In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP had won all seven seats in Delhi polling 56 per cent votes but still, the Congress vote share at 22.5 per cent was better than that of AAP at 18 per cent. According to Congress insiders, even if the national leaders favour a seat-sharing with the AAP to defeat the BJP in the national capital, convincing the party workers, who fight it out on the streets, would be difficult.
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