Regional Parties Continue To Blindside Congress: After TMC, AAP, Samajwadi Party Unilaterally Announces 16 Lok Sabha Candidates

Taking Congress by surprise, the Samajwadi Party (SP) announced its first list of Lok Sabha candidates with 16 names. SP and Congress are part of the opposition bloc INDI Alliance.

This was the second such incident after the SP national president Akhilesh Yadav claimed to have a "good start" with Congress on 11 "strong seats".

Many Congress leaders claim that the seat-sharing talks are still going on and that the unilateral announcement by the SP is nothing but a "pressure tactic". They also claim to have been blindsided.

A senior Congress leader was quoted as saying by The Indian Express, “At least four of these seats were supposed to go to us and the SP has blindsided us by announcing candidates without keeping us in the loop."

Asserting that the central leadership will decide what will be done next, he pointed out that these four seats are of Kheri, Ayodhya, Lucknow, and Farukhabad, where the SP announced its candidates.

While another Congress leader, party general secretary and the Uttar Pradesh in-charge Avinash Pande refrained from commenting on the issue and left it to the central leadership.

Meanwhile, SP national spokesperson Rajendra Choudhary defended the party's decision and said that as the Congress has been given 11 seats, it can also start announcing its candidates.

Another SP national spokesperson Udaiveer Singh acknowledged that seat-sharing talks with the Congress are still ongoing but claimed it would not be good to delay the announcement of candidates because of this.

This is not the first time when Congress has faced a unilateral decision of its ally party. Earlier, Trinamool Congress (TMC) had announced to leave only two of the 42 West Bengal Lok Sabha seats for the Congress.

And when the Congress didn't agree to it, Mamata Banerjee-led TMC went on to announce unilaterally that it would contest all West Bengal seats on its own.

Similarly, Arvind Kejriwal-led Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has reportedly said that it will contest on all 13 Lok Sabha seats in Punjab on its own.