LoP in Lok Sabha and Congress MP Rahul Gandhi with party President Mallikarjun Kharge and party leader Sonia Gandhi during the party's CEC meeting regarding the upcoming Maharashtra Assembly elections, in New Delhi, Monday, Oct. 21, 2024.
PTI
New Delhi: The Congress' Central Election Committee met here on Monday to finalise candidates for the upcoming Jharkhand Assembly polls.
Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, former party chiefs Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi, Congress general secretary (in-charge, Organisation) K C Venugopal, Jharkhand Congress chief Keshav Mahto Kamlesh and AICC in-charge of state Ghulam Ahmad Mir, among others, attended the meeting at the party headquarters.
The meeting comes two days after Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren said the I.N.D.I.A. bloc partners will contest the upcoming Assembly polls together and the Congress and the JMM will field candidates in 70 of the 81 seats.
Seat-sharing talks are on with alliance partners -- the RJD and the Left parties -- for the remaining 11 seats, he had said.
The Assembly polls will be held in two phases on November 13 and 20. The votes will be counted on November 23.
"The I.N.D.I.A. bloc will contest the Jharkhand Assembly polls together. It has been decided during the seat-sharing talks with the allies that the Congress and the JMM will field candidates in 70 of the 81 seats," Soren had said after meeting with the alliance partners here.
He had said the decision was taken after consultations with allies and the candidates would be announced soon.
Soren said the JMM-led alliance was confident of retaining power in the state on the back of its development work.
The NDA on Friday announced its seat-sharing formula among its partners. The BJP will contest 68 seats, the AJSU Party 10, the JD(U) two and the LJP (Ram Vilas) one.
Filing of nomination papers for the 43 assembly constituencies of Jharkhand, which are going to polls on November 13 in the first phase, began on Friday and will continue till October 25.
In 2019, the JMM-led alliance won 47 seats in the Jharkhand Assembly, including 30 of the JMM and 16 of the Congress.
The BJP had secured 25 seats, the JVM-P three, the AJSU Party two, the CPI-ML and the NCP one each, and two seats were bagged by independents.
Assembly Elections 2024 | The Maharashtra Assembly polls will take place against the backdrop of a fractured political landscape in the western state where the Shiv Sena and NCP will be going up against the Uddhav Thackeray and Sharad Pawar factions, even as the BJP and Congress try to make their mark. Meanwhile, in Jharkhand, the JMM faces a new challenge after Hemant Soren's recent arrest and Champai, a longstanding party member, joining the BJP. The Haryana election resulted in a shock loss for Congress, which was looking to galvanize on the Lok Sabha poll performance, while J&K also saw the grand old party eventually stepping away from the cabinet, with Omar Abdullah's JKNC forming government. It remains to be seen if the upcoming polls help BJP cement its position further or provide a fillip to I.N.D.I.A. Check live updates and track the latest coverage, live news, in-depth opinions, and analyses only on Deccan Herald.
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