The seat-sharing announcement was made at a joint press conference here by SP state chief Naresh Uttam Patel, SP national general secretary Rajendra Chaudhary, Congress state president Ajay Rai and AICC in-charge of UP Avinash Pande.Pande said the Congress will contest on 17 seats, while on the rest of the 63 seats in the state, the SP and other alliance partners will contest.SP state president Patel said, “The Congress will contest on 17 seats in UP and on the rest of the 63 seats, Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav will decide candidates.””Apart from Raebareli, Amethi and Varanasi, the other seats on which the Congress will be contesting include Kanpur City, Fatehpur Sekri, Basgaon, Saharanpur, Prayagraj, Maharajganj, Amroha, Jhansi, Bulandshahr, Ghaziabad, Mathura, Sitapur, Barabanki and Deoria,” Patel said.Sonia Gandhi is presently the MP for Raebareli, while Rahul Gandhi lost his Amethi seat to BJP leader Smriti Irani in the 2019 polls.The SP will contest the Khajuraho seat in Madhya Pradesh, which has 29 Lok Sabha seats, and support the Congress on the rest of the seats, Patel said. He said senior leaders of both parties will chalk out future programmes for the alliance.On Monday, the SP had said it offered 17 Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh to the Congress. It had earlier offered 11 seats to the Congress.Yadav did not join the yatra in Raebareli on Tuesday.”Yes, it (alliance) will happen in Uttar Pradesh. It will be announced soon,” the Samajwadi Party (SP) chief told reporters in Moradabad when he was asked about a tie-up with the Congress in the state.
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