Congress, AAP’s Message Amid Resignations OverAlliance

New Delhi:

The Delhi Congress leaders’ reservations about a tie-up with Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party have been cast aside as the two parties met yesterday to review their “joint election campaign”. Sources said leaders from Delhi and Haryana units of both parties were present at the meeting, which comes days after Arvinder Singh Lovely quit the top Delhi unit post to register his protest about the tie-up. Two other Delhi Congress leaders quit the party, calling the alliance a “great embarrassment”.

On behalf of the Congress, Delhi Congress in-charge Deepak Babaria, Delhi Congress interim president Devendra Yadav and other leaders from Delhi and Haryana were present.  

AAP was represented by General Secretary Sandeep Pathak, party MLA and PAC member Durgesh Pathak and Delhi State Vice President Rajesh Gupta.

“Both parties are united to save the country from the dictatorship of the BJP government,” Sandeep Pathak said after the meeting. The two parties will begin election campaign coordination at the grassroots level, he said.

“We have created a system in which we will cooperate in campaigning for each other and contest the elections together. It will be implemented first at the Lok Sabha level, then coordination will be done at the Assembly level,” he added.

In an exclusive interview to NDTV, Mr Lovely had indicated that the joint campaign was not working out for the Congress in Delhi and the alliance was costing the party its own turf.

“In none of seven seats of Delhi, Congress leaders’ posters are up. AAP is not even using a single poster of Congress in the seats of Delhi it is contesting from,” he said. Under the deal to share the seven Lok Sabha seats of the national capital, AAP is contesting four seats and the Congress three.

The unity, though, stops at the borders of Delhi and neighbouring Haryana. In Punjab and a few other states, the two parties have fielded candidates against each other, throwing to the winds the plan of one-on-one contests that many opposition leaders agreed was the only way to defeat the BJP.