The Hindu : Front Page : Congress, JMM finalise seat-sharing pact

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Saturday, Jan 08, 2005

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Congress, JMM finalise seat-sharing pact

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI, JAN. 7. The Congress and the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha struck a seat-sharing agreement for the February Assembly elections to the 81-member Assembly in the State. The JMM would contest 35 seats and the Congress 33. The rest was allocated to allies, the Rashtriya Janata Dal and the Left parties.

The electoral pact was finalised today after the JMM chief, Shibu Soren, met the Congress president, Sonia Gandhi, at her 10, Janpath residence. The Congress leaders, Arjun Singh and M.L. Fotedar, who were deputed by Ms. Gandhi for the seat-sharing talks were present.

The leaders said under the agreement, the JMM got two more seats than the Congress, which was the dominant partner in the Lok Sabha elections last April-May.

Both the Congress and JMM leaders said that the issue of which party would get to stake a claim for the Chief Minister's post would be decided after the polls and that the issue was left to Ms. Gandhi.

The pact was the culmination of two rounds of talks among Mr. Arjun Singh, Mr. Fotedar, Harikesh Bahadur, AICC leader in-charge of the State, and the JMM leaders, Mr. Soren and Stephan Marandi. The AICC secretary, R.P.N. Singh, and Mr. Bahadur did the spadework for the pact.

Situation different

Initially Congress leaders from the State insisted that the party should not concede more seats to the JMM on the grounds that situation now was different from the Lok Sabha elections. The Congress had staked claim on over 51 seats during the first round of negotiations, however, the party was willing to scale it down by at least 10 seats, party sources said.

The sources said that even till the last, the Congress sought that the 68 seats be shared equally but Mr. Soren's request at the highest level that the JMM be given a seat more than the Congress was agreed to.

However, the Communist Party of India general secretary, A.B. Bardhan, expressed disagreement with the unilateral announcement. "We are not at all agreeing with the pact," Mr. Bardhan told The Hindu and asserted that the CPI has legitimate claim on five seats. In the last Lok Sabha elections, the CPI's Bhubneshwar Mehta won the Hazaribagh seat trouncing the then External Affairs Minister, Yashwant Sinha.

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