Congress and AAP meet today to resolve differences with an eye toward 2024 polls

Delhi, New: The Congress is working to settle disputes within the INDIA group in order to make sure that the coalition presents a serious threat to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party in the months leading up to the Lok Sabha elections.

 

Today’s meetings between Congress leaders and the Aam Aadmi Party will address one of the rifts that have allowed the Opposition coalition to finalize a plan for seat distribution in the 2024 elections.

The Congress and AAP have engaged in a passive-aggressive verbal war on their plans to contest state and Lok Sabha elections on many occasions since uniting in July of last year.

However, the Congress will want the backing of the AAP, which controls the governments of Delhi and Punjab, in order to take on the BJP at the federal level.

Discontent has risen inside the INDIA coalition following the Congress’s humiliating setbacks in the assembly elections of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh, with Arvind Kejriwal, Nitish Kumar, Akhilesh Yadav, and Mamata Banerjee missing several of the party’s scheduled meetings.

Finally, in response to pressure from its friends, the Congress has moved to resolve the divisive seat-sharing problem. According to sources, the party wants to complete the seat-sharing arrangements before to the start of Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra’s second phase on January 14.

The Trinamool Congress and the Congress are at odds over seat-sharing in Bengal, and neither party is prepared to give ground. This presents another obstacle for the INDIA coalition.

In the past, the two parties have competed together in three elections: the 2001 assembly elections, the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, and the 2011 assembly elections. In West Bengal, the 34-year-old Left Front dictatorship was overthrown in 2011 by the Congress-TMC combination.

In order to overcome their disagreements and contest the elections together, a number of other parties in the INDIA coalition have started cooperating.

Nitish Kumar, the chief minister of Bihar, contacted his colleague in Tamil Nadu to get clarification on his statement at the most recent INDIA conference that Hindi is the national language.

Refusing to comply with a request for translation at a meeting, Nitish Kumar ignited a linguistic dispute.