As AAP, Cong ally in Chandigarh mayor polls, a sign of thaw in ties for LS seat sharing?

With the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and Congress stitching up an alliance in the Chandigarh mayoral elections scheduled for January 18, the Union Territory will see the first formal agreement between Opposition INDIA bloc partners in the country.

As part of the tie-up, the AAP will fight for the mayor’s seat, while the Congress will contest for the senior deputy mayor and deputy mayor posts. Currently, all three posts are held by the BJP.

The alliance assumes significance as the parties are now hoping it could set the tone for Lok Sabha elections.

Raghav Chadha, the AAP’s Rajya Sabha MP, hailed the alliance on Tuesday while speaking to reporters in Delhi. “The INDIA alliance will fight the Chandigarh mayoral elections with all its strength and register a historic and decisive victory. Do not consider this an ordinary election. This will be an election where for the first time it will be INDIA vs BJP. After this election, the scorecard will be INDIA 1, BJP 0. We think that the clean sweep on January 18 will be the beginning for the Lok Sabha election,” Chadha said.

Senior Congress leader and former Union minister Pawan Kumar Bansal, while announcing the alliance on Monday, had written in a post on X, “Congress and AAP in Chandigarh have become the first constituents of INDIA parties to implement the decisions and sentiments of INDIA to not let the BJP win elections by default… And together we will win all the three positions, thus heralding the end of BJP’s anti-democracy rule in the country.”

Bansal told The Indian Express that the alliance was struck to minimise the BJP in the Chandigarh Municipal Corporation. “We never opposed this alliance in Chandigarh. We felt that the (mayor seat) went to the BJP by default at least twice.