DMK, Cong sign poll pact

CHENNAI, MARCH 9
A day after breaking the deadlock, DMK and Congress today formalised their seat-sharing pact for the April 13 Assembly polls, under which the national party will contest 63 seats.
DMK chief M Karunanidhi and TNCC President K V Thangkabalu signed the agreement, hammered out after hard bargaining by both sides for about a fortnight.
“Following discussions, it has been decided to share 63 seats with Congress”, the copy of the agreement released to the media said.
Later, Thangkabalu described the DMK-Congress combine as a “winning alliance.”
If DMK gets a second term, we would automatically form part of their Government”, Thangkabalu said.
The seat-sharing talks had run into rough weather with DMK refusing to allot 63 seats and Congress was dead set on its demand, which had brought the seven-year-old alliance under serious strain.
The stalemate continued till Tuesday when DMK finally relented to Congress’s demand for 63 seats.
DMK and Congress had contested the 2004 and 2009 Lok Sabha polls from the same platform besides the 2006 Assembly elections.
Thangkabalu also said that the election panels of the two parties, comprising Union Ministers P Chidambaram and G K Vasan and Tamil Nadu Deputy Chief Minister M K Stalin on either sides, would meet tomorrow to finalise the constituencies they will contest from.
“We will take good decisions”, he said.
Meanwhile, after conquering mount DMK, the Congress faces another uphill task – that of finding a seat-sharing formula acceptable to the Trinamool Congress for the upcoming West Bengal Assembly elections.
The Trinamool Congress has given the Congress a list of 58 seats that it is willing to give the Congress for the polls based on the civic polls results of 2010. Party sources said Mamata is in no mood to relent beyond 60 seats.
The list, according to sources, is not acceptable to the Congress which wants to contest 98 of the 294 Assembly seats which was the formula in the Lok Sabha polls of 2009. The two are also at odds over who gets the winnable seats.