New Delhi, July 11: Amar Singh has kicked off negotiations with Rahul Gandhi on an alliance between the Congress and the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh.

The Samajwadi leader called Rahul and stressed that the process should get off the ground fast so that the alliance was in place when elections were called.

Rahul, the Amethi MP and a Congress general secretary, apparently sounded positive.

Although Amar said it was “too early to talk of the contours”, he said there was “no way out” of a rapprochement. “As far as I am concerned, I know it is good. Frankly there’s no way out. The country’s politics has got polarised. There is no point agonising over the bitterness of the past. The Congress and the Samajwadi Party are feeling suffocated and suppressed. The unholy opportunistic politics of the BSP (Bahujan Samaj Party) has to be checkmated.”

Sources said Rahul and Digvijay Singh would prepare the ground for the alliance along with Amar and Sonia Gandhi would step into the frame later.

“I had broached the subject of the alliance with Manmohan Singh. To be fair to him, he said he was not authorised to talk on political matters, he directed me to speak to Soniaji,” Amar told The Telegraph last week.

The Uttar Pradesh Congress has already picked up the cue from Delhi and was suitably deferential to the Samajwadis. The state party president, Rita Bahuguna Joshi, dropped in at the Samajwadi office in Delhi on July 8.

Showering praise on the Prime Minister, Amar said: “My personal relations with him were always very good. At times I know he was told not to be in touch with me. But Dr Singh is a politician who does what he thinks is right. A run-of-the-mill politician would have not have enforced the edicts of economic liberalisation, just thinking of tomorrow. He risked his political interests for what he thought was good for the nation.”

Manmohan, Amar said, catalysed the Samajwadi decision to bail out the UPA government.