 "No alliance in Delhi: Kejriwal rules out AAP tie-up with Congress")
AAP convener Arvind Kejriwal on Sunday ruled out the possibility of an alliance between his party and the Congress for the Delhi Assembly elections, setting the stage for a triangular contest in the polls due in February.
This comes a day after Delhi Congress president Devendra Yadav said the party would go it alone in the assembly elections.
"There will be no alliance in Delhi," Kejriwal said at a press conference here.
AAP and Congress are part of the opposition INDIA bloc and fought the Lok Sabha elections in Delhi together earlier this year. Both parties drew a blank, with the BJP winning all seven seats.
Over a week ago, AAP released its first list of 11 candidates, including six leaders who switched from BJP and Congress recently, for the Delhi polls.
Reacting to Kejriwal's announcement, Yadav said the Congress is "very clear" that it will not have any alliance with AAP and will contest all the 70 assembly seats in Delhi on its own.
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The alliance with AAP did "great harm" to Congress in the Lok Sabha elections, he claimed.
"The Congress has a democratic process of taking decisions and they are arrived at after careful deliberations and not in a totalitarian and dictatorial manner like Kejriwal," Yadav said.
AAP and Congress failed to reach a seat-sharing agreement ahead of the Haryana Assembly polls in October despite several rounds of talks.
Leaders of both AAP and Congress admitted that the tactical alliance between the two parties was successful in reducing the victory margin of BJP candidates on all seats in the Lok Sabha polls.
"From that point of view, an alliance would have proved beneficial in preventing a vote split between AAP and Congress in a three-way contest in the assembly elections," said one leader.
Out of power in Delhi since 1998, the BJP is making all-out efforts to wrest power from the AAP.
In the 2015 and 2020 Delhi Assembly polls, AAP won 67 and 62 seats and BJP won three and eight seats respectively. The Congress drew a blank.