Samajwadi Party fumes over seating; Congress says govt broke word

New Delhi: The Samajwadi Party's Lok Sabha MPs are said to have expressed their dissatisfaction with the government over the way front-row seats in the Houses were recently distributed, particularly the party's denial of a second front-row seat. The Congress leaders, who were clearly eager to repair ties with the ally SP, also went to the Parliamentary Affairs Minister to push for the SP's argument, claiming that the government had reneged on its earlier pledge of allocating seven front row seats to the INDIA bloc (minus the TMC).

While Congress' Rahul Gandhi and KC Venugopal (along with DMK's TR Baalu) occupy the front row seats of the Opposition benches, Kodikunnil Suresh and Gaurav Gogoi (Congress) sit on the front row of block 2, and Akhilesh Yadav (who used to sit next to Gandhi) has been moved to a front row seat of block 3, where he sits next to TMC's Sudip Bandopadhya. While the SP camp is reportedly upset about Yadav's shift to block 3 and the denial of a second first row seat to party MP Awadesh Prasad, Congress sources claimed that under a "earlier agreement with the government" of allotting one seat for every 28 members of a party, Congress was to receive "one front row seat of LoP (Gandhi) plus three more front row seats" for the party leaders, two for SP and one for DMK.

However, certain quarters disputed this claim, claiming that Congress had requested all three front row seats in block 1 (plus one in block 2), but had to settle for two in block 1 (including the seat where Yadav previously sat) and two in block 2 only because Balu refused to vacate the DMK's front row seat on block 1. They further question how SP could win two front row seats if the formula was one for every 28 seats in a party, given that it only has 37 members.