Why the Congress and AAP failed to forge an alliance in Haryana

The Aam Aadmi Party wanted to contest 10 of the 90 seats in Haryana, with at least three of them being non-negotiable. But the Congress was not ready to part with more than six seats of its choice. This is why talks between the two parties for an alliance in the upcoming Haryana elections hit a dead end on Monday, leaders from both parties told Scroll.

On September 3, Congress MP Rahul Gandhi urged the Haryana unit of his party to look into possibilities of an alliance with Aam Aadmi Party, a constituent of the INDIA bloc, to prevent the division of anti-Bharatiya Janata Party votes. Since then, at least three rounds of parleys were held between the central leadership of the two parties. Despite several state leaders from both the parties opposing the proposal, news reports on Monday morning said that the alliance was set to be announced with the Aam Aadmi Party getting five or six seats.

The announcement, though, never came. Around 3 pm on Monday, the Aam Aadmi Party released its first list of 20 candidates, indicating that the alliance had not materialised. Twelve of them were fielded in constituencies for which the Congress had already announced candidates. By late evening, leaders of both parties said that they would contest all 90 seats separately in Haryana, even as they have not yet announced candidates for all seats.

“The last date for filing nomination is September 12, so we cannot keep waiting for the Congress,” said Sushil Gupta, the Haryana unit chief of the Aam Aadmi Party. “We were always prepared to contest all 90 seats.”

Gupta refused to give a clear answer on when the remaining candidates will be announced, saying it would be done soon. On Tuesday morning, the party released a second list of nine candidates.

Raj Singh Rana, a spokesperson of the Haryana Congress blamed the Aam Aadmi Party for being “too ambitious”. He said: “We were ready to give five seats, maybe one or two more, but they were adamant on 10 or more seats. That is too much to ask for a party that has never won a seat in the state.”

An associate of Haryana Congress chief Udai Bhan, told Scroll that the Aam Aadmi Party was insistent upon contesting the Pehowa, Kalayat and Guhla seats. “We felt that this was an unreasonable demand,” the Congress leader said, on conditions of anonymity. “AAP is not in a position in Haryana to give an ultimatum.”

Opposition from Haryana Congress

The alliance talks were on shaky grounds to begin with due to opposition from many state Congress leaders – the most prominent of them being former Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda. Even as the party’s top decision making body, the All India Congress Committee, opened channels with the Aam Aadmi Party last week, there were reports of Hooda walking out of a meeting over disagreements about seat sharing.

On Monday, spokesperson Rana told Scroll that the state leadership was “convinced from the outset” that the alliance would not come to fruition. “We are committed to follow decisions taken by the high command, but our leadership in the state was always of the opinion that giving seats to the Aam Aadmi Party would mean hampering our chances,” Rana said.

Observers of Haryana politics, however, said that even as Hooda’s writ prevailed on the matter of alliance, his rivals within the Haryana Congress preferred a different outcome. Abhay Dubey, a professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, told Scroll that Congress leaders like Kumari Selja and Randeep Surjewala were in favour of forging an alliance as it would have established the control of the central leadership.

“By blocking the alliance, Hooda has asserted his dominance,” Dubey said.

Rewari-based journalist Mahesh Kumar agreed. He said that while the Congress had an upper hand over its main rival Bharatiya Janata Party in the Haryana polls, it suited Hooda’s interests to avoid an alliance with the Aam Aadmi Party. Allowing it to undercut the Congress in some seats would reduce the scale of the Congress victory. A slim majority would place Hooda in an advantageous position over his rivals within the Congress since the party would then be more likely to repose faith in the old hand. “If the Congress wins above 55 seats, Hooda will not be in a position to call the shots, the chief minister will be Delhi’s pick,” Kumar said.

As for the Aam Aadmi Party, there was some opposition among its ranks too. In a tweet on September 8, the party’s MLA in Delhi, Somnath Bharti, opposed the prospect of an alliance, calling it “misfit and selfish”.

Bharti alleged that Congress leaders had not supported Aam Aadmi Party candidates in Delhi during the Lok Sabha elections, when the two parties contested the seven seats of the national capital in an alliance. All seven candidates of the alliance, including Bharti, lost to the BJP. As Scroll reported during the campaign, there were doubts about whether the Aam Aadmi Party and Congress would be able to work together on the ground and ensure a consolidation of their votes.

On Monday, Dubey of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies said that while a vote transfer between the parties did not happen seamlessly in Delhi, because the two parties had been bitter rivals for a decade, the case in Haryana was different.

In Delhi, the party has been in power for a decade riding on a decline in Congress’ vote share, but in Haryana it has not been able to establish itself as an alternative to the BJP. In fact, the Aam Aadmi Party’s best showing in the state was a second-place finish in this year’s Lok Sabha election in Kurukshetra, where its state chief Sushil Gupta contested in an alliance with the Congress. Even as Gupta lost, the margin of defeat was a modest 29,000 votes. In 2019, the Congress had lost the seat to BJP by nearly 3.83 lakh votes.

Ironically, the encouraging result in Kurukshetra turned out to be a stumbling block in the alliance talks. Gupta told Scroll that the Aam Aadmi Party had demanded Pehowa, Kalayat and Guhla seats – which fall under Kurukshetra – as his party led in these Assembly segments in the Lok Sabha polls. But the Congress did not relent.

Whose gain, whose loss?

As things stand now, the Aam Aadmi Party appears as the bigger loser, experts said. The party has failed to take off in Haryana, despite trying its luck in the state since 2014. In 2019, when the party contested the Assembly and Lok Sabha elections on its own, the party suffered a drubbing in both the polls. It did not win a single seat, and polled less than 0.5% of the votes in both elections.

“AAP stood a chance to win one or two seats had the alliance worked out riding on the anti-BJP sentiment in Haryana,” journalist Mahesh Kumar said.

Congress leaders in Haryana have maintained that the party did not stand to gain much by giving in to the demand of Aam Aadmi Party’s demand of 10 seats. Kumar said while this was a reasonable argument on Congress’ part, it could still face some losses in close contests due to votes polled by the Aam Aadmi Party.

“There are already two Jat-dominated parties in fray [Indian National Lok Dal and Jannayak Janata Party] which might cut some of Congress and BJP votes,” Kumar said. “On top of that, the AAP will mostly field leaders who defect from the Congress and BJP. These leaders could play spoilsport due to their individual popularity.”

At the national level, Dubey said Congress had missed an opportunity to portray itself as the leader of the Opposition’s INDIA bloc. “Rahul Gandhi had floated the idea of an alliance to show that the Opposition was united against the BJP,” he said. “The failure to form an alliance gives the BJP a chance to harp on conflicts within the INDIA bloc.”