With just two days to go for the start of nominations for the October 15 Maharashtra Assembly polls, the ruling Democratic Front partners — Congress and NCP — have yet to begin their final round of seat-sharing talks between them.
A day after Maharashtra Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan said that the Congress was prepared to go it alone in the State Assembly polls in the event of failure of seat-sharing negotiations with its
ruling alliance partner, the NCP disclosed that it had not so far received any invitation for the final round of talks from its ally.
The NCP, which has also made no bones about its readiness to contest all the 288 Assembly seats in the polls in the event of failure of talks with the Congress, reiterated its stand that it would not settle down for anything less than 144 seats ( out of total 288 seats) in the impending seat-sharing arrangement with the Congress.
Justifying its demand for 144 seats, senior NCP leader and deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar said: “It is a practical demand. Earlier, formulas had been worked out on the basis of previous election results. So according to the latest lok Sabha poll result we deserve equal sharing of seats. But, there is no headway in Congress-NCP talks so far”.
“The Congress has rejected our demand for equal share ofr seats. We are hopeful that the intervention of Sharad Pawar and Sonia Gandhi will help to resolve the deadlock,” he said.
It is the party’s relatively better performance than the Congress in the recent lok Sabha polls which saw the Sharad Pawar-led party win four seats against two seats won by its senior partner, that has prompted the NCP to demand an equal share ( 144 seats) from the total 288 Assembly seats.
On its part, the Congress is playing hard ball and may at best concede 10 additional seats to the NCP than 113 seats the latter had contested in the 2009 polls.
In the 2009 polls, the Congress had contested 170 seats add won 82 seats in the 2009 polls, while the NCP had contested 113 seats and bagged 62 seats.
Meanwhile, NCP’s Maharashtra unit president Sunil Tatkare said that his party was awaiting a proposal from Congress on the seat-sharing for the Assembly polls.
Earlier, NCP spokesman Nawab Malik said that so far no official discussion on seat-sharing talks had happened since the first meeting between Sharad Pawar and AK Antony on August 20.
“Praful Patel has held informal discussions with some Congress leaders but nothing concrete has emerged. We are hopeful that the outcome will be positive. We will come to know about the Congress stand after they call us for talks,” he said.
Malik was, however, optimistic that the seat-sharing talks between the Congress and NCP would be concluded by September 20 when the nominations for the October 15 polls would begin.