Panaji, Jan 8 (IANS) The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Goa on Friday rejected any possibility of an alliance with the Congress ahead of the 2022 Assembly elections, state AAP convenor Rahul Mahambre said on Friday.
Mahambre’s comments come on a day when state Congress President Girish Chodankar hinted in an interview with a local TV news channel that the party could have an understanding with the AAP for the 2022 Assembly polls.
“There is no question of the AAP tying up with the Congress. We will be going into the state Assembly elections on our own strength. But this statement by the Congress president proves one thing, that we are not the B-team of the BJP or the Congress. It has been a charge levelled against us in the past,” Mahambre said.
With the Assembly elections around a year away — the polls are scheduled to be held in early 2022 — political parties in the state are in the process of carrying out a tentative outreach with each other for the purpose of a possible pre-poll alliance.
Leaders of opposition parties, including the Congress and the Goa Forward Party, have individually gone on record on the need for isolating the BJP, which romped home in the recently conducted zilla panchayat polls.
The AAP, on the other hand, had failed to win a single seat in the 2017 Assembly polls, even as the Congress, which had emerged as the single largest party in 2017 with 17 seats, has been reduced to a mere five seats, due to a string of defections by the party MLAs to the BJP.
–IANS
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