Bihar Mahagathbandhan's rank and file to meet
Ringing in the election season in Bihar, leaders of the Mahagathbandhan 'Grand Alliance' Opposition parties have lined up a tight schedule of meetings for both their leaders and the parties' ranks.
Ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Madhubani on Thursday, the leaders of the Mahagathbandhan will meet in Patna on Wednesday and Thursday. This will be followed by a convention for district functionaries of all the allied parties in the State capital on May 4.
At the previous meeting on April 17, during which Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) MP and the Leader of the Opposition in the Bihar Assembly Tejashwi Yadav was appointed as the coordinator for the coalition, it was also decided that the alliance should work in lockstep, every step of the way.
The campaign should not be reduced into an RJD versus National Democratic Alliance (NDA) battle alone, sources said. Many see the two-day gathering of the Mahagathbandhan 's leadership as a preliminary meeting at which each of the allies could lay out their claims. However, seat sharing talks were still a long way off, a senior RJD leader said.
'The meeting is to deliberate on our common agenda, and to come up with an assessment of the two decade-long reign of [Bihar Chief Minister] Nitish Kumar and the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) in the State,' the RJD leader said.
It has also been decided that the alliance should come up with a common minimum programme, which will be discussed over the two-day meeting.
Sources said the Congress and the Communist Party of India-Marxist-Leninist (CPI-ML) want the seat sharing formula to be worked out at the earliest. This was conveyed by Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi during their meeting with Mr. Yadav and the RJD leadership in Delhi, too.
'There is no confusion about 80% of the seats. It would be better if this is informally worked out and all partners are sounded out well in advance,' a senior Left leader said. This is easier said than done, and the RJD is keen to have a wider umbrella of castes represented in the Mahagathbandhan's list of candidates, with emphasis on non-Yadav Other Backward Classes (OBCs).
The leadership meeting has been scheduled to coincide with Mr. Modi's tour to Bihar also in order to take away media focus from the Prime Minister's presence in the State, sources said.
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