Congress To Fight On 17 Seats in UP

The Congress will contest 17 of Uttar Pradesh's 80 Lok Sabha seats in the forthcoming general election, while the Samajwadi Party will be allotted the remaining 63, the INDIA bloc members said this evening.

This is the first major seat-share deal announced by the opposition alliance, which was formed in June to defeat Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party in the 2024 Lok Sabha election.

Apart from its strongholds of Raebareli and Amethi (lost to the BJP's Smriti Irani in 2019), the Congress will field candidates from Kanpur Nagar, Fatehpur Sikri, Basgaon, Saharanpur, Prayagraj, Maharajganj, Amroha, Jhansi, Bulandshahar, Ghaziabad, Mathura, Sitapur, Barabanki, and Deoria. In addition, it has also been given Varanasi, which is Mr Modi's constituency.

The Samajwadi Party, meanwhile, will assign seats to regional parties from its share; at least one of these regional parties, though, is not expected to be in play with Jayant Chaudhary's Rashtriya Lok Dal believed to have re-aligned itself with the BJP despite agreeing a seven-seat deal with the SP last month.

After finalizing seat sharing, Samajwadi Party General Secretary Rajendra Chaudhary and his Congress counterpart, Avinash Pandey, addressed a press conference in Lucknow, at which the former threw down a warning for the BJP, which has dominated UP's electoral landscape over the last 10 years, winning 71 seats in 2014 and 62 in 2019.