Lok Sabha election: In Bihar, Congress wants 15 seats, RJD says no way

PATNA: A day before the crucial Grand Alliance meeting on seat-sharing in Delhi, its major partners RJD and Congress indulged in a fierce muscle-flexing exercise on Tuesday. The two parties even threatened each other to go it alone in the Lok Sabha election scheduled from April 11.
Sources said RJD president Lalu Prasad is not in favour of giving more than 11-12 seats to Congress, which is demanding minimum 15 out of the 40 Lok Sabha seats in Bihar to contest.RJD has authorized Lalu for finalizing seat-sharing arrangements with at least six other anti-BJP parties, including the Left, in Bihar. The RJD chief is recuperating in RIMS (Ranchi) while serving jail term in fodder scam cases.
The war of words erupted after Congress legislature party leader Sadanand Singh told reporters here that they are capable of contesting the election alone. “Rahul Gandhi had already said in Patna rally on February 3 that Congress will fight from the front. I hope issues will be sorted out soon, but if situation arises, our party will fight it alone, like in Uttar Pradesh,” he said.
Sadanand further said: “Congress is fighting BJP in the country as the main opposition party and our party is rising as a powerful force. Our condition has drastically improved lately as has been witnessed in three states where Congress formed government recently. The huge turnout of people in Rahul’s rally also reflected the fact that common people were now choosing Congress.”
Reacting to Sadanand’s comments, RJD national vice-president Shivanand Tiwari said RJD is not dependent on Congress. “I don’t understand the need to make such a statement when the seat-sharing talks are in the final stages. Nonetheless, I am bit perturbed by the way Congress is negotiating with anti-BJP parties in the country. First, they were left out of the SP-BSP alliance in UP and then could not ally with AAP in Delhi as well,” Tiwari told TOI.
Tiwari, in fact, praised BJP for accommodating regional allies. “BJP sacrificed five sitting seats in Bihar for its allies. Similarly, it successfully sealed an alliance with Shiv Sena in Maharashtra, even though the latter had kept abusing the BJP over the last five years,” Tiwari said.
Left parties are also getting restless over the delay in reaching an agreement among the Grand Alliance partners. CPI(ML) has already rejected the RJD offer of only one seat. “We had held talks with RJD senior Jagdanand Singh a couple of days back and he told us that we are being given only one seat. We outrightly rejected the offer and asked him to tell Lalu ji to review it. Even though we had contested 23 seats in 2014, we are asking for only six seats this time,” said Kunal, CPI(ML) state secretary in Bihar.
CPI(ML)’s general secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya had said in Patna on February 6 that the Left parties might contest separately if they are not given a respectable number of seats.