Battle For Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra

Two big states of India - Uttar Pradesh with 80 and Maharashtra with 48 Lok sabha seats - are particularly important for the outcome of the grand 2024 election battle. In UP, seat-sharing arrangements between SP and Congress have finally worked out. In a joint media interaction today, both parties announced that the Congress will fight on 17 seats, including important seats such as Varanasi, Kanpur, Ghaziabad and of course Raebareli and Amethi that the congress won for years before it lost Amethi in 2019. In Maharashtra, the story is very different. In the last two years, the NCP has broken into two, Shiv Sena has split, and important congress leaders such as Milind Deora and Ashoka Chavan quit the party. BJP president JP Nadda is going to start his two-day Maharashtra tour, with Mumbai today, with organisational meetings. So the question we ask tonight is, what is going to be the fate of alliances in these two politically critical states, UP and Maharashtra.