tna September 20, 2005
| In a claim that is patently laughable, the Congress says it wants to contest 113 seats in the Assembly elections in Bihar in alliance with the Rashtriya Janata Dal and other United Progressive Alliance constituents. |
| In the last election, the Congress had been given 84 seats to contest by RJD chief Lalu Prasad and had won in 10. This time, the pressure to contest more seats is coming from the ground, instead of leaving matters to the central party leadership. |
| At a nine-hour meeting last night, the state election committee of the Bihar Pradesh Congress Committee prepared a panel of names according to certain broad criteria. |
| BPCC chief spokesman Kripanath Pathak said apart from the 10 seats it had won in the February polls, and the 10 where it had finished second, the seats where RJD candidates had lost by a margin of 10,000 or more votes and where RJD nominees had finished second but had not won in last three successive elections, were being claimed by the Congress as its own. |
