Under a pact with the ruling Telugu Desam Party, the Bharatiya Janata Party will contest nine Lok Sabha and 27 assembly seats in Andhra Pradesh in the forthcoming elections.

Chief Minister and TDP president N Chandrababu Naidu and BJP general secretary Pramod Mahajan announced this after daylong talks in Hyderabad on Wednesday.

"I am very happy," Mahajan said. "It is not the numbers we are looking at. It is the friendship that is important."

He said the BJP central election committee would meet on March 21 and announce the list of candidates from Andhra Pradesh.

The BJP was allotted eight LS and 24 assembly seats in the simultaneous polls held in 1999. It won seven LS and 12 assembly seats at that time.