After West Bengal, Cracks Open In Punjab - INDIA Bloc's Mann Says AAP To Go Alone

Counting Congress” stubborn attitude regarding seat sharing as one reason, reports quoted Bhagwant Mann as saying that his party will go alone in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections in Punjab. Punjab has 13 Lok Sabha seats and deliberations on seat sharing between INDIA alliance partners Congress and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) was going on to finalise a deal. This development comes on the heels of Mamata Banerjee”s announcement in the morning in which she said her party Trinamool Congress would contest all 42 seats in West Bengal, signaling that there will not be an alliance in the state with Congress.

Announcing the decision, the Punjab chief minister said: “In Punjab, we will not do anything (alliance with the Congress) like that. We have nothing with the Congress.” He also expressed his confidence that the AAP will win in all 13 Lob Sabha constituencies. According to sources, Kejriwal has approved the decision of the chief minister to go to poll alone without the joining India bloc.

However, in 2019, out of the 13 constituencies that included Gurdaspur, Amritsar, Khadoor Sahib, Jalandhar, Hoshiarpur, Anandpur Sahib, Ludhiana, Fatehgarh Sahib, Faridkot, Firozpur, Bathinda, Sangrur and Patiala, AAP only won one seat, contested by the current chief minister Bhagwant Mann. The party had performed even better in the 2014 Lok Sabha election, obtaining 25 percent of vote share. In the 2019 Loke Sabha election, AAP’s vote share had fallen to 7. 36 per cent.

In 2019, the Congress had won 8 seats, while both the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) garnered 2 seats each respectively. With the AAP contesting the election alone, it cannot be ascertained whether the INDIA alliance will be affected by the Punjab chief minister’s decision to stay away from the bloc