The United Front was in chaos yesterday as SP president Mulayam Singh Yadav released the list of his candidates in Lucknow, while the remaining Front partners waited for him in Delhi to release the lists of all the parties jointly.
Though the Dal officially refuses to reveal which seats have been given to it, its leaders and workers are sulking for not getting their choice of seats, and getting far fewer than their claims.
The Janata Dal has paid the price for being responsible in roping Ajit Singh into the UF. The 40-plus seats to him have all gone from our kitty. But for the BKKP, the Dal would have got 100-plus seats, says one of the leaders who was involved in negotiating seat-sharing for the last one week.
Ajit Singh, on the other hand, could not be happier. A Front leader who negotiated with him to quit the Congress claimed that PV Narasimha Rao had not been willing to give him more than 10 seats. He admitted that Ajit Singh's party could now hope to win a good number of the seats it had been given.
If Ajit had remained in the Congress, he would not have got the Jat-dominated seats in Meerut, Moradabad and Agra divisions that he has got from Mulayam Singh - for the simple reason that the main support vote of the Congress's alliance partner, the Bahujan Samaj Party is politically and numerically equally relevant in this region as the Jats are.
On the contrary, the Janata Dal has got a raw deal from the SP, as it did during the Lok Sabha elections.
Then, the Dal got only 16 of the 85 seats, and could win only two of them. A party functionary was sore with Mulayam Singh for keeping most of the good seats with himself this time around also.
However, a Dal functionary from western UP concedes that if Dal had sacrificed many of its seats for Ajit Singh, in the bargain, it had also got some seats like Garh (Ghaziabad), Sheohar (Bijnore), Sardhana (Meerut), Moradabad West and Dibai (Bulandshahr) where the prospects of victory were bright.
Adding to the woes of the Dal's leadership, the party's women workers like the Mahila Janata Dal president Saroj Dubey are sore with their own party for giving only two of the sixty seats to women.
Women in the Congress were also sorely disappointed when the party released its list of 114 candidates, with only two women among them. 14 more names are to be announced today, the rest of the seats being left for the Congress's senior alliance partner, the BSP.
There were 14 reserved seats in the Congress's share, belying the fear among Congress workers from the state that the BSP would leave no reserved seat for them. There were nine Muslim candidates in the Congress's predominantly upper caste list, less than the proportion of Muslims in the state's population.
Some party leaders from the state continued to complain about the bias in favour of PCC president Jitendra Prasada's nominees.
