Joint Oppn meeting: Amid date issues, Nitish says parties must send their chiefs

“Nitish Kumar called me one day and informed me about the meeting on June 12. Before deciding the date there was no consultation with me. I have not been informed about the postponement either. In fact, I had asked Kumar whether he had spoken to all the others. He said all of them had agreed. I remember telling him that he should consult every party before deciding the date,” the leader said.

“Had all the parties been consulted about the date and venue, this situation would not have arisen,” another leader said.

The postponement was a direct fallout of the fact that both Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and senior Congress leader Rahul Gandhi expressed their inability to attend the June 12 meeting.

Congress sources said the date had not been fixed in consultation with the party.

On May 22, after Nitish, along with JD(U) national president Lalan Singh, met Kharge and Rahul in Delhi, and apprised them of his talks with Opposition leaders, the Congress had said that the venue and date of the joint Opposition meeting would be announced in a day or two.

Six days later, the JD(U) apparently unilaterally issued a statement in Patna that the meeting would be held on June 12.

The Congress, which wanted the meeting to take place after June 20 – Rahul is returning from a tour of the United States on June 18 – chose to remain silent officially.

But other parties too were not happy with the date. DMK chief and Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M K Stalin as well as the CPI(M) are learnt to have conveyed to the JD(U) that June 12 was inconvenient for them. The DMK reportedly urged Nitish to reschedule.

The DMK indicated that it would send its senior leader and Lok Sabha MP Kanimozhi as its representative for the meeting. The Congress then put out that since both Kharge and Rahul were unavailable, it could send one of the party’s CMs to the June 12 meeting.

Incidentally, speaking on Monday, Nitish seemed to suggest that this was one of the reasons the meeting had been pushed. “We had to put off the June 12 meeting after the Congress and another party conveyed to me that they found the date inconvenient. I have therefore decided to postpone the meeting and asked the Congress to suggest a new date after consultation with other parties,” he said, adding: “But I have made one thing very clear. All parties which agree to attend the meeting must be represented by their respective heads… If any party insists that it be represented by someone else, that would not be acceptable.”

Nitish went on to give the Congress example. “There was an impression that the Congress may send someone other than its president. This was something we could not accept.”

The signal from the JD(U) supremo was clearly that the absence of heads of parties would rob the conclave of its seriousness, and that it should not be seen as a preparatory meeting as some of the Congress leaders – not too keen about entirely ceding the lead space to the JD(U) – had been claiming.

For now, the Congress has let Nitish do the groundwork of bringing Opposition parties under one umbrella, as there are many parties which might be uncomfortable with the Congress taking the lead.

A leader pointed out that there were two sets of parties in the Opposition camp – those which are allies of the Congress or have fought elections with it, like the DMK, NCP, RJD, JMM and the CPI(M), and those which, far from an electoral alliance with the Congress, are its main rivals in states, like the Aam Aadmi Party and Trinamool Congress.

“Those who are not allies of the Congress need not be on the same page as the Congress on every issue…,” the leader said.