Now, tribal party dumps Congress in MP

Bhopal: Following footsteps of BSP and SP, Gandwana Gonatantra Party (GGP), a tribal outfit holding sway in around two dozen assembly constituencies in Madhya Pradesh, on Monday decided to dump Congress and go it alone in the November 28 polls in the state.

Announcing his party’s decision to not to have any poll understanding with Congress in the year-end assembly elections in MP, GGP vice-president and former MLA Darbu Singh Uike said, “My party is of the firm view that Congress was never interested in forging alliance with us and hence deliberately dragged the matter with a mischievous intention to dump us in the last moment.”

“Congress tried to fool us into making us believe that it was genuinely interested for a tie up with GGP. But, the party was never interested to have alliance with us. Congress has cheated us,” Mr Uike told reporters.

He added that the MP Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) president Kamal Nath had invited GGP for seat sharing talks on September 16.

“We have presented Mr Nath a list of 11 candidates our party wanted to field. But, thereafter there was no response from Congress,” Mr Uike said.

He declared that GGP would field candidates in all 230 assembly constituencies in MP. The core committee of the party which met in Jabalpur in MP on Sunday took the decision, he added.

The party on Monday announced candidates for 22 assembly seats.

GGP which has presence in at least 14 tribal dominated districts in MP, had bagged between 10,000- 30,000 votes in 27 assembly constituencies in 2013 assembly elections and came second in half a dozen seats.

GGP’s share of votes in the last assembly elections in MP was 4.32 percent, whereas there was a gap of around eight percent of votes between ruling BJP and Opposition Congress in the 2013 polls.