Madhya Pradesh: Kamal Nath Breaks Silence on Feud With SP

Bhopal: Congress veteran Kamal Nath on Thursday revealed the reason for not going for any kind of understanding with Samajwadi Party (SP), a member of INDIA bloc, in the November 17 assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh, saying that the seats chosen by the Akhilesh Yadav party to field its candidates would have served the interest of BJP.

“We tried (for alliance with SP), it was not about seats, the question was which seats. The seats for which our people said that the BJP would be benefitted, there it could not happen...”, he told reporters in Chhindwara in Madhya Pradesh.

The issue had snowballed into a controversy when Mr Yadav took strong exception to the manner in which Congress had dumped his party’s proposal for seat sharing in MP after initiating negotiation for it.

He had also warned of a ‘tit for tat’ treatment to the grand old party in the coming polls in Uttar Pradesh.

Later, rubbing salt to the wounds of the SP supremo over the issue, Mr Nath had said ‘Aare bhai ye akhilesh Vakhilesh chodo’ (forget about Akhilesh Yadav).

Congress veteran Digvijay Singh had however sought to downplay the issue saying that SP wanted to field its candidates in six seats in MP. But, he recommended Mr Nath to give the party four seats.

Mr Singh said that he had no clue on why the seat-sharing issue did not take off.