From Our Bureau
NEW DELHI: Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, who dumped the Bharatiya Janata Party, to unite the opposition parties for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, has sought an appointment with Congress president Sonia Gandhi the next week on or around September 25 to discuss his poll strategy.
He will be here to attend the birth anniversary of Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) founder and a former deputy prime minister Devi Lal being organised as a rally here the next Sunday on September 25.
The rally will be the gathering of many opposition leaders as INLD chief Om Prakash Chautala has invited the leaders like Nitish Kumar, Sharad Pawar, Akhilesh Yadav and Dr Farooq Abdullah. Nitish has already met all these leaders as also Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal and the left leaders.
Sources in Nitish camp said he would try to convince Sonia Gandhi in their one-to-one meeting here on September 25 to mend fences with the leaders like Telangana CM K Chandrasekhar Rao, AAP convener Kejriwal and Trinamul Congress supremo Mamata Baneerjee. Nitish already had a meeting with former Congress President Rahul Gandhi during his last visit, but he couldn’t meet Sonia since she was abroad.
While Mamata and Chandrasekhar Rao have been championing formation of a third front minus the Congress, Nitish has called for formation of the “main front” that also includes Congress and the Left.
The Congress, however, appears to have other plans as it does not want to join the parties that have been traditionally against it like Samajwadi Party and BAhujan Samaj Party in Uttar Pradesh, AAP which it sees as a prompt of Home Minister Amit Shah to sabotage the Congress votes as in Punjab, Goa and Uttarakhand and now in Gujarat, or the Telangana Rashtra Party of Chief Minister Chandrasekhar whom it confident to defeat in the next polls in the state.
