NEW DELHI: Uttar Pradesh Congress in charge Rajendra Pal Gautam on Sunday demanded “equal share and equal respect” for his party amid the ongoing tussle with alliance partner Samajwadi Party over seat sharing for the upcoming assembly polls in the state.Gautam said that both Congress and SP must move forward together and asserted that both parties should settle the seat sharing issue in October.“I have been saying from the beginning that there should be equal respect and an equal share. After all, Congress is the country’s oldest and largest party. Congress fought the freedom movement and represents the idea of India,” Gautam told news agency ANI.“As far as seat-sharing is concerned, I have been saying from the beginning that we should settle the seat-sharing issue completely in the month of October so that every person who is contesting, or will contest, gets enough time to work in their constituency,” he added.The remarks came after Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav said that the larger objective of the alliance should be electoral victory rather than which party is getting how many seats.In a post on X, Akhilesh said that when the objective is clear and alliance partners work together, the journey towards the goal becomes easier.“When the goal is clear, hand in hand we stand; when the gaze is fixed on the destination, the journey becomes easy! The big thing isn’t how many seats the alliance gets or which seat goes to whom – the big thing is that we all must ensure that the victory belongs to the alliance,” Akhilesh said.“Let us repeat again: It’s not about the seats, it’s about the victory,” he added.The SP chief said the proposed alliance victory would be larger than the interests of individual parties and linked the effort to issues including communalism, democracy, the Constitution, reservations and social harmony.
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“This victory will be greater than the parties in our alliance – it will be the victory of all of us, of that united effort that persists in struggle so that communalism may never raise its head again, so that BJP’s influence may not touch democracy, the Constitution, or reservations, and so that the country’s harmony may bloom once more, and the nation’s progress and prosperity may smile again,” he said.Uttar Pradesh is heading for assembly polls in 2027.In the 2022 assembly polls, BJP retained power by winning 255 of the 403 constituencies, securing a 41.29 per cent vote share.Former CM Akhilesh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party came a distant second in the 2022 election, securing 111 seats and getting 32.06 per cent of the votes.Meanwhile, SP and Congress fought the 2024 Lok Sabha elections in Uttar Pradesh as allies under the INDIA bloc.The Samajwadi Party (SP) won 37 seats in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, emerging as the single-largest party in Uttar Pradesh and the third-largest party overall in the 18th Lok Sabha. Congress holds six of the 80 Lok Sabha seats.
