No alliance with BSP won’t harm Cong prospects: Nath
STRAIGHT TALK Leaders say Cong can’t give 50 seats to an ally with insignificant presence BHOPAL/ NEW DELHI:
A day after Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) supremo Mayawati ruled out an alliance with the Congress in the coming assembly polls in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, MP Congress president Kamal Nath said the lack of a tie-up wouldn’t harm his party’s prospects in the former state and argued that the BSP had unrealistic seat-sharing expectations.
Nath said the BSP wanted to field candidates in 50 out of the 230 assembly seats in MP which, together with Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Mizoram and possibly Telangana, faces assembly polls before this year-end, a demand he described as unrealistic.
Explaining why the seat-sharing talks broke down, Nath told journalists in Bhopal: “They were demanding seating which they had never won and had vote share of 1000 to 4000 votes in the last assembly elections. Interestingly, they were not demanding seats in which they had vote share of 25,000 to 30,000 votes,” Nath said.
Mayawati’s decision dealt a potential setback to efforts for opposition unity ahead of the state polls leading up to next year’s general election.
On top of her decision to ally with Ajit Jogi’s Janta Congress in Chhattisgarh, her snub to the Congress cast a shadow on efforts to forge a Mahagatbandhan (grand alliance) of opposition parties, including the BSP, Samajwadi Party and the Congress, in the Lok Sabha elections from Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-ruled Uttar Pradesh.
Senior Congress leaders based in New Delhi said the Congress can’t afford to give 50 seats to an ally that had an insignificant presence in Madhya Pradesh. They also said the BSP was demanding a large number of seats in one particular region of MP that is a stronghold of the Congress.
“We took a conscious decision last month not to pursue the alliance in the wake of this absurd demand,” said a senior Congress strategist on condition of anonymity. The development comes at a time the Congress has started consultations with its state unit chiefs to explore alliances for the 2019 elections.
At the party’s war room in Gurdwara Rakabganj Road in New Delhi, Congress leaders are holding regular meetings with state unit heads.
The Congress central leadership, however, is hopeful that what happened in MP won’t affect the possibility of a seatsharing pact in Uttar Pradesh for the Lok Sabha polls.
In Madhya Pradesh, the Congress leadership is still open to a pact with the Samajwadi Party, which has demanded 10 seats in MP, said a party official.
Even after Mayawati declared candidates for 22 seats in Madhya Pradesh on September 20, Nath had insisted that the Congress was still in talks with the BSP over a pre-poll alliance.
“It (lack of alliance with BSP) won’t have any impact,” he said on Thursday. “The people are wise and they understand everything”. He chose not to explain the context of his remarks.
In the same breath, Nath also said the doors of the Congress were still open as the party did not want a division of votes that would benefit the Bharatiya Janata Party.
“The possibility (of an alliance) is still there. Our doors are still open (to BSP). We are in talks with SP over seat-sharing and I had a talk with (SP president) Akhilesh Yadav four days back in this regard.”
Congress politicians said that according to an internal analysis, had the party agreed to Mayawati’s demand, the BJP would have benefitted the most.
“Of the 50 seats Mayawati was demanding, there are 10 which BSP had won in 2003, 2008, or 2013 elections and they had a realistic chance. Had we agreed to her demands, it would have meant gifting 40 seats to the BJP,” a senior Congress leader, who did not wish to be named, said.
“It was this unrealistic demand that made a section of Congress leaders suspect that Mayawatiji was more interested in helping the BJP. These leaders believe that Mayawati is under pressure from the BJP due to various cases against her, and that is why talks with BSP were not really going forward,” the leader said.
Congress insiders said Nath was not keen on an alliance with Mayawati in MP.
Answering a query on Mayawati blaming senior Congress leader Digvijaya Singh for the breakdown in talks, Nath said, “Mayawati had to blame someone so she blamed Digvijayaji”.
Bahujan Samaj Party state president Pradeep Kumar Ahirwar said, “The Congress had been spreading this rumour that we were in talks even after (candidates for) 22 seats were declared in MP by our party. Mayawatiji had told us long ago to be prepared to contest 230 seats”.
Seven Rohingya Muslims who were caught in 2012 for illegally entering the country were handed over to Myanmar authorities at Manipur’s Moreh border post on Thursday afternoon, hours after the Supreme Court refused to stop the government from deporting them.
“They have been handed over to Myanmar authorities at 1.30 pm in the presence of Manipur police and Assam’s Cachar district police accompanying them,” S Ibomcha Singh, the Superintendent of Police of Tengnoupal district told Hindustan Times.
The seven were handed over at Moreh town on India-Myanmar border in Manipur’s Tengnoupal.
The deportation came after a last-ditch effort by advocate Prashant Bhushan for an urgent hearing of a PIL in the Supreme Court to restrain the government from deporting Rohingya refugees failed.
Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi, referred to the affidavit filed by the central government, said the seven had been convicted for travelling to the country without requisite papers and Myanmar had already accepted them as their nationals.
The seven had been held at the Silchar central prison in Cachar district since 2012 on charges of illegal entry.
Thousands of Rohingya Muslims have fled Rakhine State on Myanmar’s western coast for years, often caught between the military and Rohingya insurgents who have fought a bloody war for years.
The refugees, nearly 7 lakh according to UN agencies, are living in camps in Bangladesh, but some did cross over into India also. The Indian security establishment believes there may be upwards of 40,000 refugees in India.
The government says illegal Rohingya immigrants pose a national security threat and ordered state governments last year to identify and deport them.
GUWAHATI: