The Congress on December 19 described news reports claiming the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Samajwadi Party (SP) were getting ready to announce their Lok Sabha tie-up without them as “premature”.
The BSP too had denied reports that the party would formally announce the tie-up on January 15 on the occasion of party chief Mayawati’s birthday. “This is not true. This can never be true. Birthdays are never celebrated like this,” said BSP Rajya Sabha MP Satish Mishra outside Parliament House.
The growing distance between the Congress and U.P.’s two biggest regional parties BSP and SP have been noticed in recent events. The two parties attended neither the joint Opposition meet chaired by Sonia Gandhi on December 10 nor the recent swearing-in ceremonies of the Congress governments in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan.
“Everybody here realises the importance of minimising and preventing vote division and you have to wait for the story to unfold in January and February,” Congress spokersperson Abhishek Manu Singhvi told reporters at the party’s official briefing.
“The Congress party is certainly keen and ready to be part of any secular, non-communal, reasonable alliance, understanding, adjustment... by whatever name it is called... But provided it is respectable and it does not cause harm not only to the other parties but also to Congress Party and is effective in preventing vote division,” he said.
Asked how long the Congress would wait for the BSP-SP to initiate the process of stitching up an alliance, he said: “You can rest assured that if it is so to happens, it will happen within a reasonable time frame… But by the end of the day, if things don’t turn out, we are a national party and we have fought elections on our own.”
