The Congress and Samajwadi Party have come to a consensus on seat-sharing in the Gandhi family’s pocket-borough of Amethi and Rae Bareli in the upcoming Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls.

The allies will now share five each of the 10 seats that were being hotly contested. The Congress had been demanding all the ten seats, and the SP resisting it on the grounds that it had won as many as seven of them in the 2012 Assembly elections.

The Congress has now been allocated Tiloi and Jagdishpur (SC) in the Amethi parliamentary segment, from where party Vice-President Rahul Gandhi is MP. Both these seats had been won by the Grand Old Party in the last election. However, it is still not clear whether the Amethi Assembly segment will continue to be a sticking point.

This sitting MLA from this seat is the SP stalwart Gayatri Prasad Prajapati, whose candidature has already been announced by party chief and Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav. The Congress, on the other hand, wants this seat to be allocated to Rajya Sabha MP ‘Raja’ Sanjay Singh’s wife Amita Singh. The BJP has already fielded Sanjay Singh’s first wife ‘Rani’ Garima Singh from this seat and a ‘Battle Royale’ is being anxiously awaited.

Meanwhile, in the five Assembly segments in Congress President Sonia Gandhi’s parliamentary constituency of Rae Bareli, the party has no sitting MLA but has managed to get three seats allotted to their share. The Congress will contest Harchandpur, Rae Bareli and Sareni seats. The Harchandpur seat was won by Surendra Vikram Singh of the SP. It will now be contested by Rakesh Singh of the Congress. The Sareni seat, which was won by the SP’s Devendra Pratap Singh, will have the Congress’ Ashok Singh as its candidate.

In the Rae Bareli seat, local heavyweight Akhilesh Kumar Singh of the Peace Party had won in 2012. His daughter Aditi Singh has now been fielded by the Congress.

These names figure in the latest list of 29 candidates declared by the Congress on Thursday. The seats pertain to Amethi, Rae Bareli up to Gorakhpur, Jaunpur and Varanasi segments in eastern Uttar Pradesh.

Another interesting aspect of this arrangement is that the Congress will be taking on the incumbent BJP MLAs in the Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s parliamentary constituency, Varanasi. Varanasi (South) and Varanasi (Cantonment) are two Assembly seats held by the BJP, which, however, witness infighting over ticket distribution.

From Varanasi (South), the venerable Shyamdeo Roychowdhary, a seven-term BJP MLA popularly known as “Dada” has been replaced by a relative newcomer Neelkant Tiwari, triggering a wave of resentment against ticket allotment in the PM’s constituency. Similarly, the sitting MLA from Varanasi (Cantt) Jyotsana Srivastava’s son Saurabh has been fielded from the same constituency. Local cadre is protesting against this controversial candidate whose name figures in several local conflicts and criminal activities.