New Delhi:

The Delhi Congress leaders’ reservations about a tie-up with Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party have been cast aside as the two parties met yesterday to review their “joint election campaign”. Sources said leaders from Delhi and Haryana units of both parties were present at the meeting, which comes days after Arvinder Singh Lovely quit the top Delhi unit post to register his protest about the tie-up. Two other Delhi Congress leaders quit the party, calling the alliance a “great embarrassment”.

On behalf of the Congress, Delhi Congress in-charge Deepak Babaria, Delhi Congress interim president Devendra Yadav and other leaders from Delhi and Haryana were present.  

AAP was represented by General Secretary Sandeep Pathak, party MLA and PAC member Durgesh Pathak and Delhi State Vice President Rajesh Gupta.

“Both parties are united to save the country from the dictatorship of the BJP government,” Sandeep Pathak said after the meeting. The two parties will begin election campaign coordination at the grassroots level, he said.

“We have created a system in which we will cooperate in campaigning for each other and contest the elections together. It will be implemented first at the Lok Sabha level, then coordination will be done at the Assembly level,” he added.

In an exclusive interview to NDTV, Mr Lovely had indicated that the joint campaign was not working out for the Congress in Delhi and the alliance was costing the party its own turf.

“In none of seven seats of Delhi, Congress leaders’ posters are up. AAP is not even using a single poster of Congress in the seats of Delhi it is contesting from,” he said. Under the deal to share the seven Lok Sabha seats of the national capital, AAP is contesting four seats and the Congress three.

The unity, though, stops at the borders of Delhi and neighbouring Haryana. In Punjab and a few other states, the two parties have fielded candidates against each other, throwing to the winds the plan of one-on-one contests that many opposition leaders agreed was the only way to defeat the BJP.

New Delhi:

Arvinder Singh Lovely, who stepped down from the post of the Delhi Congress chief, has strongly refuted speculation that he is about to change camp and has been acting at the behest of the BJP. Asserting that he has not leaked his own resignation letter to the media or resigned from the primary membership of the party, Mr Lovely said he stepped down because he felt unequal to the task of sacking people.

“I was being asked to remove leaders loyal to the Congress for generations. I couldn’t do that…  A party should reach out to disgruntled people, not alienate them further,” he told NDTV in an exclusive interview.

About his bigger grouse — the Congress tie-up with longtime rival Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party in Delhi — Mr Lovely indicated that the alliance was costing the Congress its own turf. Under the deal to share the seven seats in the national capital, AAP is contesting four seats and the Congress three.

But “in none of the seven seats of Delhi, Congress leaders’ posters are up. AAP is not even using a single poster of Congress in the seats of Delhi it is contesting from,” he said, declaring that after readying the Congress state unit for the alliance, he is “facing insults now”.

For Delhi Congress — swept out of power by the anti-corruption campaign led by Anna Hazare and AAP leaders even before the party was formed — a tie-up with Arvind Kejriwal is anathema. Their stiff resistance had scuttled the Opposition’s unity efforts in 2019. But with the Opposition call to present a united front this time, the two parties have come on board with a seat-sharing plan.

The unity, though, stops at the borders of Delhi. In Punjab and elsewhere, the two parties have fielded candidates against each other, throwing to the winds the plan of one-on-one contests that many Opposition leaders agreed was the only way to defeat the BJP.

Mr Lovely, who went to show support for Arvind Kejriwal after his arrest, said today that he was only carrying out the party high command’s orders. “I always toed the high command’s line – till now,” he told NDTV.

In his letter to Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge, Mr Lovely had pointed to the jailing of several AAP ministers in connection to corruption cases. Despite that, the Congress formed an alliance with Arvind Kejriwal’s party for the Lok Sabha elections. Unable to protect the interests of the Delhi Congress workers, he was resigning from the post, he had added.