The Tamil Nadu assembly election will take place in a single phase on April 6.
New Delhi:
The DMK has decided to allocate 25 seats to ally with Congress for next month’s elections in Tamil Nadu, sources told NDTV on Saturday. The party will also give Rajya Sabha a seat in Congress, they said.
According to sources, the Tamil Nadu Congress had asked for at least 30 seats, while the DMK said it would only grant 24, leading to a stalemate. The deal was closed after congressional leaders in Delhi contacted top DMK leaders in Chennai on Saturday night, they said.
“After discussing with our high command, we met with the head of DMK, MK Stalin, now to finalize the agreement for the distribution of seats. The agreement will be signed tomorrow morning at 10 am,” said the leader of the Congress, Dinesh Gundu Rao, without detailing the details of the agreement. .
With little bargaining power in the state, the head of the Tamil Nadu Congress, KS Alagiri, had said this week that “the ball is DMK’s court” when it comes to sharing election seats.
There have been multiple rounds of talks between the two sides on a seat-sharing pact, while Congress chief Rahul Gandhi made several trips to the state to campaign for the polls.
In the 2016 assembly elections, Congress was allocated 41 seats and won seven of them.
“The ball is in their court (of DMK). So it is the DMK that has to decide (share seats),” Alagiri said when asked how many seats his game had requested.
Responding to a question, he denied that Congress had made a “drop” in the number of seats it was seeking from the DMK.
The DMK, hoping to return to power after being in opposition for 10 years, has assigned three seats to the Muslim League of the Indian Union and two to Manithaneya Makkal Katchi.
The party’s decision on Congress comes a day after rival AIADMK assigned 20 seats to the BJP.
The Tamil Nadu assembly election will take place in a single phase on April 6 and the vote count will take place on May 2.
Tamil Nadu will see competition primarily between the ruling AIADMK and the opposition DMK, while many will also keep their eyes peeled to see how actor-turned-politician Kamal Haasan’s new party, Makkal Needhi Maiam, fares.
This is the first election after the death of two iconic leaders J Jayalalithaa of AIADMK and M Karunanidhi of DMK.
.
