Among the Congress candidates the SP said no to were UPCC chief Salman Khursheed for the Farrukhabad Lok Sabha seat, Raj Babbar for Fatehpur Sikri, Beni Prasad Verma for Gonda, Begum Noor Bano for Moradabad or Rampur, P L Punia (former principal secretary to the UP Chief Minister) for Barabanki, Ratna Singh for Pratapgarh, and R P N Singh for Kushinagar.

SP leaders Amar Singh and Ram Gopal Yadav, who represented the party at the talks, would have nothing to do with former party colleagues Raj Babbar and Beni Prasad Verma. The party also wants to field its own candidates on other contentious seats, for instance Jaya Prada from Rampur, Baleshwar Yadav from Kushinagar, and Chandra Bhoosan Singh from Farrukhabad.

“Among the two we may agree on Raj Babbar because he is a winnable candidate, but we don’t see any chance for Verma,” confided a senior SP leader.

Not to be outdone by the SP, which did not hesitate to flaunt its “big brotherly status” in UP, Congress interlocutors including Digvijay Singh, Rahul Gandhi and Rita Bahuguna Joshi emphasised on “clean image of the candidates” apart from “winnability” to be the determinant factors for selection, according to sources. This may have been directed at Raja Bhaiyya’s confidant Akshay Pratap Singh, who is eyeing Pratapgarh.

Also figuring on the Congress list of candidates submitted on Monday were PCC chief Rita Bahuguna Joshi from Allahabad, Union Minister Jitin Prasada from Dhaurara, and Jagdambika Pal from Domariaganj.

Amar Singh was learnt to have asked the Congress about its reported plans of an alliance with the RLD. The latter clarified that while they considered the RLD a secular party, Ajit Singh had to make it clear “whether he is with Mayawati or with us”.

SP leaders reportedly also sought to expand the pre-poll alliance with the Congress beyond UP to Maharashtra, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar. Rahul Gandhi is said to have assured them that he would convey this to Congress president Sonia Gandhi.

The Congress might have only nine seats from Uttar Pradesh in the present Lok Sabha, but it is eyeing “at least 25 to 30” out of the 80 seats. Its logic is simple: nine seats that were won last time, seven seats on which it came second, and three on which it came third but polled more than the SP. Apart from these 19, the Congress claims to have made inroads into many other seats, especially in the Bundelkhand region.

The argument put up by the Congress interlocutors on Monday was that delimitation of constituencies had changed caste equations drastically and the SP could, therefore, not start its count from the 2004 general election.

At Monday’s meeting, while the Congress proposed candidates on “about two-third of the seats”, the SP named its candidates on all 80 seats. Further talks will take place on September 8.