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BJP-TDP seat-sharing talks fail

Syed Amin Jafri in Hyderabad

The ruling Telugu Desam Party and the Bharatiya Janata Party have failed to reach an understanding on seat-sharing for the civic elections in Andhra Pradesh scheduled for March 9.

A one-to-one meeting between Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister and TDP president Nara Chandrababu Naidu and state BJP president Chilakam Ramachandra Reddy in Hyderabad at the weekend could not break the stalemate between the two parties on seat-sharing for the municipal elections.

With the virtual breakdown of talks with the TDP, the BJP is bracing up to contest the polls to the civic bodies on its own.

"Despite good efforts on our part and probably on their part as well, we could not come to an agreement on the number of municipalities to be contested by the two parties. We could not arrive at a figure which could satisfy our two parties," BJP spokesman and former state unit president V Rama Rao has announced at a media conference.

He said the BJP was keeping its options open for contesting all the municipalities going to the polls on March 9.

He said that the three-member committees constituted by the respective parties met thrice in recent days and could not arrive at an understanding on seat-sharing.

The BJP spokesman refused to go into the specifics of the "hurdles" that created an impasse but indicated that there were "differing perceptions" among the two parties on their respective strength. "The maximum that the TDP was ready to offer was 18 municipalities while the BJP thought that the barest minimum it could settle for was 22," he pointed out, in response to repeated queries.

As the talks got stuck with regard to the municipalities, the two parties could not go into the seat-sharing for the municipal corporations, Rama Rao said. As many as 103 municipalities and five municipal corporations -- Visakhapatnam, Vijayawada, Guntur, Kurnool and Warangal -- are going to the polls on March 9.

"Efforts are on by us to contest all the municipalities. However, the state election committee of the party will take a decision on the number of municipal chairmen's posts that the party will contest. We will finalise the names of these municipalities and the candidates in a couple of days," the BJP spokesman added.

He said that despite the "friendly contests" in the civic polls, the relations between the TDP and BJP would remain cordial.

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