Lok Sabha Election 2024: AAP-Congress seat-sharing talks stall, AAP asserts solo dominance

AAP-Congress held two round of talks, but there is no consensus on seat-sharing for Lok Sabha polls yet.

Even after a second round of talks on seat-sharing for the upcoming parliamentary polls, uncertainty continues to persist between the Aam Aadmi Party and the Congress over 20 Lok Sabha constituencies in Delhi and Punjab.

The confusion escalated on January 24, after Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann said his party would contest all 13 Lok Sabha seats in Punjab.

“We are not forging any alliance with the Congress party in Punjab and the AAP will win 13-0 in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls,” said Bhagwant Mann.

His statement came at a time when both the parties, constituents of the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA), have tied up to contest the Chandigarh Mayoral polls.

Under the pact, the AAP candidate is running for the mayor’s post, while two candidates from the Congress party are contesting for the deputy mayor’s post in the Union Territory.

The two parties are also locked in talks over seat sharing in Punjab, Haryana, Goa, and Gujarat for the upcoming parliamentary elections.

Read: Seat deal hits crossroads as Cong targets 4 Delhi seats, AAP seeks a wider alliance

The top leadership of the two parties is claiming that talks on seat-sharing are progressing beyond their expectations, but on the ground, especially in Punjab, the state leadership is expressing their interest in going it alone to the polls.

Earlier in December 2023, Congress’ Punjab unit president Amarinder Singh Raja had said his party would contest all 13 Lok Sabha seats in the border state, saying the party had better prospects. Singh had backed his argument that Congress won eight Lok Sabha seats in the state in 2019, whereas the Aam Aadmi Party won only one.

However, in the 2022 Assembly polls, political dynamics in the state changed after the AAP scored a landslide victory and Congress stalwart Amarinder Singh joined the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Out of the 13 Lok Sabha seats in Punjab, AAP has offered six to Congress and three out of seven seats in Delhi where neither has an MP. Sources said that the Congress is looking for a larger share of seats in Delhi to agree with the Punjab offer.

They also said that in Delhi, the AAP is confident of performing well after it wrested control of the city’s municipal corporation from the BJP, which administered the civic body for 15 years, by bagging 134 out of the 250 seats.

Read more: Opposition Unity: AAP and Congress cannot sustain an alliance, whatever the formula

“AAP’s national leadership would be considering factors across the country to negotiate with the Congress, but in Punjab, the party has better prospects. Despite the fact, that there’s resentment against the government, people think AAP is better when they compare it with Congress or Shiromani Akali Dal,” Punjab-based senior journalist and author Shamsher Chandel said.

The AAP’s state leadership has realised this factor because of which Mann has been saying his party will win all the seats in the state. The Congress is making a similar claim, but it seems illogical as AAP has broken the Congress's 24-year grip on the Jalandhar Lok Sabha constituency by-election with a thumping margin of over 58,000 votes, Chandel pointed out.

In a four-corner contest in May 2023, Sushil Kumar Rinku, a former Congress MLA from Jalandhar West in the previous Assembly who later switched to AAP, defeated his closest rival, Congress' Karamjit Kaur, the wife of Santokh Chaudhary, whose death during the Bharat Jodo Yatra necessitated the by-poll.