New Delhi, March 13: Seat-sharing for the Lok Sabha elections has become a classic pawn game. The chief contenders for power — the Congress and the BJP — are so jittery about venturing out too far alone on the poll chessboard that they are having to concede home space to lesser allies.

King and Queen stand verily stagnant, even reduced, as the embattlements assume shape; it’s their flanks that have the run of the field.

There is perhaps no greater yardstick of the curtailed ambitions of the two alliance leaders than the fact that leaving aside high-profile Delhi, the Congress and the BJP are in head-on battle in only four major states — Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. Elsewhere, the allies are dominating the battle.

In Bengal, the need to maximise the gains from a “weakened” Left Front has meant that the Congress has reduced itself to a third of the seats contested in 2004, conceding more than her share of flesh to Mamata Banerjee.

On paper, the Congress has had to give away far fewer in Maharashtra — only one seat over the NCP’s 2004 share of 21 — but it has had to quietly stomach overt and covert suggestions of an underhand deal between Sharad Pawar and the Shiv Sena.

Pawar has openly praised Sena boss Bal Thackeray, expressed gratitude for their advocacy of his candidature as possible Prime Minister and peeled the “untouchable” tag off the Sena. Pawar has, of course, denied any secret deal with the Sena but sources in his party have been less circumspect. One of them happily hinted that the NCP was not above undercutting the Congress in Maharashtra where it was in a straight fight with the Sena. “The next prime ministership could be anybody’s game, why should we be left out of it? We are, after all, only an ally of the Congress, not the Congress itself.”

But the main alliance burdens have been the BJP’s to bear. Having already lost key friends in Andhra Pradesh (Chandrababu Naidu) and Tamil Nadu (Jayalalithaa), the party was left stunned by Naveen Patnaik’s late-stage guillotine act in Orissa. A major chunk of the 21 Lok Sabha seats from the state was suddenly vapour.

But the losses owing to the severance with the BJD are rippling far beyond Orissa. Quick to sense that the BJP had been shaken, other key allies upped their demands. The JD(U), for instance, wanted two more in Bihar to take its share to 26 of 40. What’s more, it demanded three seats in Uttar Pradesh, including Meerut for the former Hapur MP, K.C. Tyagi.

To-and-fro negotiations are still on between the BJP and the JD(U), although it is quite likely the latter will be happy to wrest the Kishanganj seat from the BJP, quitting the squabble over Madhubani. Tyagi, though, is still battling for Meerut, underlining his claim on the grounds that substantial sections of his former constituency of Hapur (he was Janata Dal MP) have come under Meerut after delimitation.

Conceding that Naveen’s withdrawal from the NDA had left the BJP weakened and its allies more assertive, a JD(U) leader said: “The point is not one or two seats here and there, the point is Patnaik’s blow has made us bolder and the BJP has no choice but to entertain our demands, even though it may not eventually concede all of them.”

That sentiment has come to play in the BJP-Sena alliance in Maharashtra. Even though the overall share of the two remains the same — 26 seats to the BJP and 22 to the Sena — the local party has succeeded in shuffling constituencies and grabbing a few new ones of its choice. Among them are South Mumbai, Yavatmal and Kalyan in return for Bhiwandi, Jalgaon and Mumbai Northwest.

“A stronger BJP would have been able to resist these changes,” said a party leader. “But as things stand today, we are not in a position to be as firm as we would have liked. Eventually, alliances are key to our power calculations, we must be realistic and not lose sight of that.” That quote could so easily have belonged to a Congressman.