At least 15 parties will be represented by their presidents at the June 23 meet in Patna that has been called as part of the initiative of Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar to forge a larger opposition unity to fight the BJP in the 2024 parliamentary polls, deputy CM Tejashwi Prasad Yadav said on Thursday.
Yadav said BJP was “scared” of fighting the 2024 Lok Sabha polls against a united opposition. “It is not for BJP to decide what impact the opposition conclave is going to have. They are scared of facing the Lok Sabha polls. They recently lost assembly elections in Himachal Pradesh and Karnataka. They are staring at a series of defeats in states like Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Delhi and Haryana,” he told reporters in Patna.
Asked whether Telangana chief minister K Chandrashekhar Rao, popularly called KCR, would be attending the mega meeting in Patna, Yadav said, “We could not have a word with him so far.”
The Telangana CM had come to Patna on August 31 last year and met chief minister Nitish Kumar and his deputy Yadav, during which the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) founder had endorsed the need for larger opposition unity.
Meanwhile, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar also spoke about the meeting on June 23. “He (Nitish Kumar) called me up and extended an invitation. He has invited the opposition leaders of the country. I will go there. He has extended the invitation keeping in mind the necessity to work together on a national issue and it is our duty to give him our support,” he told news agency ANI.
On Wednesday, JD(U) president Rajiv Ranjan Singh alias Lalan Singh and Tejashwi Yadav had announced that top Congress leaders like Rahul Gandhi and its president Mallikarjun Kharge, West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee, Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal, Jharkhand CM Hemant Soren, Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav and Left party leaders would be attending the meeting.
Former Maharashtra CM Uddhav Thackeray is also likely to attend.
( with inputs from PTI and ANI)
