BENGALURU: The Congress and Janata Dal (Secular) will fight the 2019 general elections together as a pre-poll alliance, as announced by Congress leader KC Venugopal. The announcement was made after both the parties reached an agreement on Karnataka Chief Minister HD Kumaraswamy's cabinet after days of negotiation. The Finance Ministry has gone to the regional party and the home department and the Bengaluru city development to the Congress.
Both partners have also formed a coalition coordination and monitoring committee that has to meet at least once every month and will, apart from smoothing the rough edges of running the government together, clear every appointment to statutory boards and organisations. Former Chief Minister Siddaramaiah will chair the coordination committee and Danish Ali of the JD(S) will be its convenor. The alliance will also come up with a common agenda for governance based on the manifesto of the two partners. Venugopal said that the two parties had decided to join hands because they had secured over 50 per cent votes.
“Rahul Gandhi was so helpful all along... very involved... even this morning he spoke to HD Deve Gowda,” JD(S) leader Danish Ali said after the pre-poll alliance for 2019 Lok Sabha was announced. Both the partners had been locked in endless negotiations in Bengaluru and New Delhi over who would get the plum portfolios. The FM was believed to have been the sticking point but the Congress decided to give the portfolio to its partner on Congress President Rahul Gandhi's direction. Karnataka sends 28 members to the Lok Sabha where the Congress and the JD(S), who fought separately in 2014, have just nine members, eight of them from the Congress.
JD(S) leaders said their combined vote share of 56 per cent in the just-concluded assembly elections was an indicator of the potential that the alliance had. The latest announcement suggests the two sides had attempted to work out the distribution of powers in great detail to ensure that the last-minute coalition does not fall apart.
