New Delhi: The Samajwadi Party (SP) is looking to expand its base beyond Uttar Pradesh. So it wants alliance not only in Uttar Pradesh but a few other state by imposing conditions on the Congress for a crucial Opposition alliance in Uttar Pradesh ahead of next year’s Lok Sabha elections. Senior leaders from both sides are in touch to hammer out differences.

On Sunday, senior SP leaders indicated that the party’s rank and file wants seats from the Congress in the assembly poll-bound states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh in exchange for a pact in UP, where the party already has an alliance with the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). “After fighting against each other in these states, an alliance only for UP would look absurd,” SP general secretary Kiranmay Nanda said.

It was reported that the SP wants to spread its wings in three other Hindi-belt states of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. Assembly polls in these three states are due next month.

Earlier the BSP, too, demanded a pan-India pact with the Congress as the two sides were negotiating alliances in the poll-bound states. Party chief Mayawati eventually picked Ajit Jogi’s Janata Congress Chhattisgarh over the Congress in Chhattisgarh, and has announced candidates for 22 seats in Madhya Pradesh. Congress leaders, however, have not given up hopes of a wider alliance with the BSP.

Leaders from the SP and the Congress also maintain that they are hoping to hammer out a deal in the coming weeks.

In mid-September, senior leaders from the Congress and the SP met to discuss the modalities of a possible alliance. A Congress functionary said that the talks did not yield desired result as the SP is “wary about the caste equations and distribution of seats”.

Another senior Congress leader added that party president Rahul Gandhi and senior party leaders such as Ghulam Nabi Azad and Salman Khurshid have been discussing the modalities of an SP-BSP-Congress pact in the country’s most populous state.