By IANS,
New Delhi : Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar Tuesday urged the Congress to be “pragmatic” about seat sharing arrangement for Maharashtra assembly polls.
“We are expecting (the) Congress party to convey their thinking…they have to take a pragmatic step,” Pawar told NDTV television channel when asked about the Congress demanding more seats this time.
The Congress-NCP alliance is in power in the state for the last ten years.
In the 2004 assembly polls, the Congress had contested 157 of the 288 seats and the NCP fought for 127 seats, leaving the rest to allies. The NCP had won 71 seats while the Congress got 69 seats.
In the Lok Sabha election, the Congress contested 25 of the 48 seats at stake and won 17 seats, while the NCP got only eight of the 21 seats it contested.
It is on the basis of its performance in the April-May general elections that the Congress plans to stake claim to almost 170 seats this time, say party sources.
“After the delimitation (of constituencies) and seeing the number of seats that we have in the Lok Sabha, we will stake claim to at least a dozen more seats than those we contested the last time,” a Congress leader involved with the party’s election preparations in the state told IANS.
Maharashtra goes to polls Oct 13.