NEW DELHI: Hoping for a resolution to the standoff with the Congress, the DMK had sent its representative Dayanidhi Maran to meet the Congress top brass — Mukherjee, Ghulam Nabi Azad and Ahmed Patel, even as the other five party ministers remained holed up at Alagiri’s official residence in Delhi, after reaching the capital to hand in their resignations.
P Chidambaram joined the group after Maran left to convey the revised Congress stand back to his party. Till that time in the afternoon, Azad had a single phrase in response to queries: “deadlock continues”.
But the dark clouds lifted somewhat as the evening wore on. After senior Congress leader and Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee briefed party president Sonia Gandhi about the new benchmarks in the bargaining, a senior Congress leader said “a solution could be expected by tomorrow morning.”
While the Congress may see its demand for 63 seats being granted, it managed to do it so without any collateral deal: it made it clear to its ally that it was in no position to interfere with the Supreme Court-monitored probe into the 2G spectrum scam.
Sources in the Congress claimed the breakdown in negotiations was at least partly caused by “the DMK’s intra-party tussles”. Alagiri is refusing to part with any of the winning seats from his stronghold-south Tamil Nadu-while his brother M K Stalin doesn’t want the Congress to be accommodated in the northern pockets of the state.
On its part, the Congress is reluctant to contest from only the urban/semi-urban seats where the heat of the 2G spectrum scam can be felt the most. It wants “winning seats” from the northern belt as well, since the AIADMK is expected to sweep the south.
The Congress, of course, also had to work on quelling faction feuds within its own local unit, which has been working hard to disrupt the Congress-DMK alliance any which way. There was also a section in the central unit which saw benefits in separating from the DMK, but for the moment the status quoists seem to have won the day.
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