A pre-poll alliance with the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) will help the Congress in the upcoming Madhya Pradesh assembly election, senior Congress leader Digvijaya Singh has said.In an interview to NDTV telecast on Monday, the former Chief Minister spoke in favour of alliance with the Mayawati-led party citing its strength to get Dalit votes in certain regions in the state."If you seek an alliance on election results in Madhya Pradesh... from Morena division to Gwalior division to Sagar division to Rewa division, there is a belt bordering Uttar Pradesh, where BSP gets 10-30,000 votes."If you see that these votes which are primarily from Dalits.. who have been been overwhelmingly voting for Congress from 1952 onwards... if we have a tactical alliance, a pre-poll alliance with BSP, it will certainly help," he said.
Asked whether Congress is ready to take a back seat and cede more ground to alliance partners as the 2019 general elections nears closes in, Digvijaya Singh said it depended on numbers and that each state had a different character which has to be factored in."It depends on numbers. Prior to 2004 elections there was no pre-poll alliance... political arithmetic works at some places but doesn't work at all places... There are number of factors which come to the fore when it comes to forming alliance."Every state has its strength and weakness. Therefore I think you have to go state-wise to see which are the parties with which Congress can come together," he said.Commenting on Pranab Mukherjee's much-talked about address at RSS headquarter in Nagpur, Singh said that it was very courageous of the former President to challenge the RSS in their own "den" and that what he said was amounted to hitting at the "core ethos of the RSS".