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NCP exerts pressure on Congress

Manas Dasgupta

NCP has no political base in Gujarat, says Congress
It has won 3 seats in 2007 Assembly elections

AHMEDABAD: In a bid to exert pressure on the Congress for an alliance, the Nationalist Congress Party is claimed to have finalised candidates for all 26 Lok Sabha seats in Gujarat.

NCP State president Jayant Patel said here on Saturday that his party was prepared to contest all seats in Gujarat if no understanding was reached with the Congress. The NCP would demand at least seven seats if the Congress was interested in allying with it. Otherwise, it would be ready to go it alone.

State Congress sources, however, felt that the NCP was “exaggerating” its demands and said it could be allocated one or at the most two seats, that also for the sake of an alliance at the national level. The NCP has no political base in Gujarat and cannot win an election without the Congress support, the sources claim.

The NCP, for the first time, has entered the Gujarat Assembly by winning three seats in the December 2007 elections by contesting as an ally of the Congress. Then the NCP demanded over 40 seats in the 182-member Assembly, but was allocated seven of which it won three, including Mr. Patel himself from Sarsa in Kaira district. Two of the NCP seats, Sarsa and Devgadh-Baria in the Panchamahals district, fall in central Gujarat, a strong base of the Congress, while the third seat it won was Gondal in Rajkot district in the Saurashtra region.

The Congress sources, however, claimed that even in the Assembly elections, the NCP did not have enough “winnable” candidates and barring Mr. Patel himself and a couple of other candidates, the remaining were those who had demanded the Congress ticket but were put up as the NCP nominee because the seats had been allocated to the party under the alliance.

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