Mumbai | The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and the Indian National Congress announced a seat-sharing pact for the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly election, which will be held in October.
Both NCP and Congress will fight on 125 seats each, former Maharashtra Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan announced.
The remaining seats will be left for the allies.
Maharashtra has 288 Assembly seats.
In 2014, the two parties had contested the state elections separately. NCP chief Sharad Pawar had ended the 15-year alliance after the two parties had been unable to reach a seat-sharing arrangement.
With a steady inflow of leaders from various parties into the BJP, Chavan accused the ruling dispensation of misusing power to finish off the opposition. “Political parties are at the heart of parliamentary democracy, but now this is under threat. There is an attempt to take the country towards one-party rule which the country briefly experienced during Emergency,” he alleged, in a reference to the recent joinee NCP MP Udayanraje Bhosale shifting to BJP.
Bhosale’s decision came as a jolt to the 20-year-old NCP whose many prominent leaders, including some former ministers, have quit the party to join the BJP and Shiv Sena ahead of the state assembly elections.
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