Today in Politics: PM Modi to visit Rameswaram temple, Congress yatra in Arunachal for a day

While the INDIA alliance recorded its first success in seat-sharing talks in Uttar Pradesh on Friday, with the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) reaching an agreement, the main challenge remains a pact between the SP and the Congress and how this develops in the coming days will be closely tracked.

The Akhilesh Yadav-led party is not keen on giving the Congress the 20-plus seats that it wants in UP. In 2019, the Congress contested all 80 seats on its own and managed to win only one (Sonia Gandhi’s constituency Rae Bareli). This time, the party,as reported by Asad Rehman, has given the SP a list of 28 constituencies and is hopeful go getting around 25. The party won 21 seats in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls and has based its demand on this, believing it can repeat that performance. SP leaders told Asad that the Congress “is overplaying its hand” by asking for 28 seats.

At the first meeting between the two parties earlier this week, they decided that performance in the 2022 Assembly elections, their hold in specific seats as well as potential candidates will be among the major criteria based on which an agreement would be finalised. As Anjishnu Das explained in hisData Pack column this week, the numbers are on the SP’s side and by the logic of numbers, the Congress does not have much leg to stand on.

“Looking at the 2022 Assembly polls in terms of the 80 Lok Sabha constituencies, each of which comprises five to six Assembly segments, the INDIA bloc allies came out ahead of the NDA in only 23 seats, of which the SP won 20 on its own strength with the Congress’s votes making a difference in only 3 additional seats,” Anjishnu wrote.

Meanwhile, the Punjab and Haryana High Court on Saturday will hear an AAP