Congress sees 135 tally in reach

MANDATE 2004

An internal assessment by the Congress suggests that if the party tries, it can reach the 135-mark in the forthcoming Lok Sabha.

If it reaches this point, the party is confident of cobbling together the numbers through allies to stake claim to forming the government.

Top Congress sources told Business Standard that while the party was concerned at the possibility of dropping a few seats in Assam and Punjab, the losses will be compensated by the gains in Haryana, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and possibly Tamil Nadu.

The Congress has no seats in Haryana where it expects to get five, has just five Lok Sabha seats from AP, nine seats in Maharashtra and two in Tamil Nadu.

What is worrying the leadership is that while the carefully structured alliance between the Congress and the Telengana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) is enduring and working well to prevent a splitting of votes in the Telengana region of AP, the alliance is coming unstuck in the seats that the Congress has given to the CPI.

In nine seats, the CPI and the TRS have put up candidates against each other. The obvious gainers of the split in the vote will be the Telugu Desam Party. Negotiations are on to prevent this, but Congress leaders are gloomy at the damage this will cause them in the overall AP result.

The Congress is also reconciled to losses in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. It expects to win at least two seats out of the five in Himachal Pradesh (where currently it has none) and two seats out of the seven in Delhi (where also, it has none).

But this is the party's dream scenario. Its nightmare scenario is a situation in which the BJP and allies' tally comes down and Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav's seats from UP and elsewhere go up to 40.

The Congress calculation is that in that event, the Congress and allies- including the Left - will have no option left but to make Yadav the Prime Minister to prevent the BJP-NDA from coming to power.

This, in the Congress view would be a sure sign of another election in two years, and the ferocious return of the BJP-NDA to power after that.

When asked if the Left parties were exercising any kind of pressure on the Congress, the leaders said the pressure being felt by the party now was nothing compared to the emphasis the Left would put on the Congress-Left relationship while drawing up a common minimum programme that would govern the alliance.

But no concessions had been made to accommodate the Left in the manifesto or economic programmes released by the party in this round of elections, they said.