Congress, AAP to ally in Haryana Assembly polls? Seat negotiation talks to begin soon, says report

The next step is to divide up the Assembly's 90 seats, which is potentially the trickiest part.

NDTV quoting sources said that in the early exchanges, the AAP has demanded 10 seats, while the Congress is willing to give between five and seven.

The Congress is reportedly also willing to give one seat to the Akhilesh Yadav's Samajwadi Party.

AAP Rajya Sabha MP Raghav Chadha and Congress General Secretary KC Venugopal are likely to meet on Wednesday to sort this out, according to reports.

The deadline for nominations is Oct 4 with voting on Oct 5.

However, there is no confirmation yet on whether this alliance will be extended into the Delhi Assembly election, in which the AAP has triumphed every time since 2013 but faces a stern test this time, with Chief Minister and party boss Arvind Kejriwal still in jail in the liquor policy case.

The development comes hours after it emerged that Rahul Gandhi, the Leader of the Opposition, suggested the INDIA bloc members continue the partnership formed before the April-June general election.

As per NDTV's sources, Gandhi wanted to retain the alliance to guard against division of votes.

In the 2024 Haryana Lok Sabha election, the Congress and AAP contested the state's 10 seats 9:1.

The Congress won five of its shares while the AAP lost the one seat it was contesting, the Kurukshetra, to the BJP's Naveen Jindal by around 29,000 votes.

The two parties got 21.19 percent and 1.11 percent of the votes, respectively. Combined, this was well below the 36.5 percent amassed by the BJP.

The Congress' vote share was lower than it managed in the 2019 Lok Sabha (in which the BJP got over 58 percent of the votes) and Assembly elections (the BJP got 36.49 percent).

Nevertheless, the consolidation of the Congress and AAP voter bases was seen as helping the INDIA bloc win its five seats and stop the BJP from a second straight clean sweep in the heartland state.