Senior Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has hit out at the BJP ahead of the opposition meeting in Patna, where over 15 political parties will gather to devise a joint strategy to take on the BJP in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections.
Rahul Gandhi, who expressed confidence that the opposition parties will rout the BJP together, added that the ruling party was working to spread hate, and violence and break the country. "We are working to spread love and unite. Opposition parties have come here today and together we will defeat BJP," Rahul Gandhi said.
The meeting is being hosted by Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar of JD(U) and his deputy Tejashwi Yadav of RJD at the former's Aney Marg residence.
Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, her Delhi counterpart Arvind Kejriwal, Punjab's Bhagwant Mann, Tamil Nadu's M K Stalin, Jharkhand's Hemant Soren, Samajwadi Party supremo Akhilesh Yadav, Maharashtra's former chief minister Uddhav Thackeray, and NCP president Sharad Pawar are among the leaders expected to attend it. Leaders of the PDP, CPI(M), CPI, CPI(ML) and the National Conference will also attend the first high-level opposition meeting.
"We will win Telangana, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and BJP will be nowhere to be seen. We will win because we stand with the poor but BJP means giving benefit to only 2-3 people," Rahul added.
The former MP added that there was a war of ideology going on in India. "On one side is Congress party's 'Bharat Jodo' ideology and on the other RSS and BJP's 'Bharat Todo' ideology," he said.
Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, who arrived with Rahul in Patna, too stressed that "If we win Bihar, we will win India."
"We all want to fight together against BJP and our agenda is to remove the BJP government," Kharge told reporters. He added that Congress leader Rahul Gandhi was instrumental in bringing together the Opposition leaders from across the country.
Posters put up at Patna ahead of the opposition meeting | Josekutty Panackal
Meanwhile, the spotlight is on whether or not Congress will support Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in the Rajya Sabha against the Centre's ordinance on the control of administrative services in Delhi. The Congress has so far been reluctant to make its stance clear.
When queried about the same, Kharge, before leaving for Patna on Friday morning, said his party would decide on it before the Monsoon Session of Parliament. "Opposing it or proposing it does not happen outside, it happens in Parliament. Before Parliament begins, all parties decide what issues they have to work on together. They know it and even their leaders come to our all-party meetings. I don't know why is there so much publicity about it outside," Kharge said.
"About 18-20 parties decide together on what to oppose and what to accept. So instead of saying anything now, we will take a decision before Parliament begins," he said.
Kejriwal, meanwhile, has upped the ante over the ordinance on the eve of the meeting, writing to the opposition leaders to urge them to keep it on top of the meeting's agenda. He has also said that Congress will have to make its stand on the ordinance clear in the meeting.
While Telangana chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao-led Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) has decided to stay away from the meeting, Andhra Pradesh's ruling party YSR CP has also decided not to join the opposition huddle. "We have not invited Mayawati, Naveen Patnaik, K Chandrashekar Rao and YS Jagan Mohan Reddy, so there is no question of them skipping the meeting," JD(U) leader K C Tyagi had said ahead of the meeting.
