Rahul Gandhi and Sitaram Yechury met in Parliament Wednesday over coffee and toasted bread, a chance encounter during which the Congress and CPM leaders discussed the GST bills over 30 minutes. Hours before Rajya Sabha began discussing the bills, the Congress, whose amendments had been defeated in Lok Sabha, held a meeting of its parliamentary strategy group and indicated it may not press its amendments in the Upper House. Other Opposition parties are keen to push amendments. Sources said Yechury was entering Central Hall and Rahul coming out when they met. Rahul invited Yechury for coffee to the Congress Parliamentary Party office, the first time Yechury has gone there since the Left withdrew support to UPA-I in 2008. The sources said Rahul spoke about the futility of pressing amendments in Rajya Sabha since the government had tabled the GST bills as money bills. A week earlier, five amendments moved by the Opposition to the Finance Bill were adopted in Rajya Sabha, only to be rejected by Lok Sabha. Yechury, however, reportedly told Rahul that the Opposition should at least “symbolically” register its objections by passing amendments and sending the bills back to Lok Sabha. The Congress, the CPM and the Trinamool Congress have given amendments. Those by Jairam Ramesh (Congress) and Derek O’Brien (TMC) are identical: that the bills abrogate parliamentary sovereignty on taxation matters. The sources said the CPM would press for voting on the amendments moved by its members T K Rangarajan and Tapan Kumar Sen. At the AICC briefing in the evening, Congress spokesperson Rajeev Gowda said the party would not press for voting on its amendments; hours later, party sources told The Indian Express a final call would be taken only on Thursday, after talking to other Opposition parties. “We will see where there will be agreement. It will be decided on the floor Thursday,” a top CPM leader told The Indian Express. Sources did not rule out the possibility of the Congress backing an amendment of any other party to symbolically make a political point. The Rahul-Yechury meeting came days after Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar asked the Congress and the Left to take the initiative to build an anti-BJP national alliance. Sources said Rahul and Yechury did not venture on to that topic. Nitish had walked into AKG Bhawan, the CPM headquarters, in February – long before the UP poll results — and met top CPM leaders, proposing the idea of the national alliance to stop the BJP in its tracks.
