Congress wanted 150 seats across state, says Ghulam Nabi Azad

Azad also said that Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi and Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav will share the stage during the campaign, and Priyanka Gandhi would campaign outside Rae Bareli and Amethi, “if need be”.

According to Congress sources, Akhilesh had promised to give the Congress 142 seats before the Election Commission ruled in his favour on the ‘cycle’ symbol but scaled it down to 121 later. “The party got a shock when he unilaterally announced candidates in 208 seats a day after,” said sources.

Azad, meanwhile, described as “nonsense” reports that alliance talks got stuck because the Congress wanted to contest in all the seats in Rae Bareli and Amethi, the Lok Sabha constituencies of Sonia Gandhi and Rahul. “We were given four out of the 10 seats earlier and now we have five. If the reports were true, we should have got all the seats in Rae Bareli and Amethi,” he said.

“The talks were stuck because we wanted a respectable number. We had started our campaign six months ago with an aim to come to power on our own but in between, a number of developments took place. within the SP, the Parliament session. We also felt that our basic purpose was not just to come to power, but also defeat the communal forces and bring all secular forces together,” said Azad.

“We did not want to take the chance of contesting alone and let three secular parties fight each other, giving the BJP a chance to get elected like what happened in the (2014) Lok Sabha elections. In the Parliament elections, they (BJP) got only 31 per cent votes while anti-BJP parties got 69 per cent votes. But we got defeated because of the division of secular forces. We did not want that to happen again,” he said.

Since the BSP was not willing to join hands with the Congress, “we thought at least two secular forces should come together to stop the BJP”, he said.

Of the 105 seats that Congress got, 44 will go to polls in the first and second phases, on February 11 and February 15, respectively.