Chief Minister of West Bengal, Mamta Banerjee will be back in Delhi to decide on who they will field for president of India. Mamta Banerjee met Congress President Sonia Gandhi in New Delhi this week and shares with the Congress regarding the responsibility of getting as many opposition parties as possible on the board. Till now, opposition leaders, like Nitish Kumar and Ms. Banerjee have already met each other and with Sonia Gandhi to discuss on the lead on a joint candidate. They have also discussed with the Left’s Sitaram Yechury.
Although the Shiv Sena is an ally of the BJP, they voted against their alliance’s candidates in the last two years’ presidential elections. They are expecting a cross section of those parties, including the National Conference, the DMK and the BJD of Orissa. Ms. Nanerjee has taken the key role in this game. Even she will talk to those parties who have a greater distance from the Congress party, like Arvin Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). Mamata Banerjee met Arvind Kejriwal during her New Delhi visit and discussed the presidential election. On the other hand, it is also true that Mamta’s Trinamool will find difficult to approach CPI and CPM. There Congress will talk to the leaders of CPI and CPM.
But Nationalist Congress Party chief Mr. Sharad Pawar has been rejected Sonia Gandhi’s offer to be a joint opposition’s candidate. Other names for the candidate are former Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar and former diplomat Gopalkrishna Gandhi.
The first meeting will be on Thursday and multiparty discussions will be held in the meeting. Top Opposition leaders will also call a meeting in the first week of June 3 in Chennai. DMK Chief Karunanidhi’s son MK Stalin is expected to take over as the party chief. The presidential election will be held in July 2017 after completion of the term of President Pranab Mukherjee. The NDA is hoping for the support of parties like the BJD and AIADMK, because they have a fraction less than the votes it needs to put its candidate in the Rashtrapati Bhawan. The opposition party doesn’t seem to have the actual numbers to win, but its decision to field a joint candidate is seen as testing ground for an alliance to take on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the general national election of 2019 when Prime Minister Narendra Modi will seek a second term.
It is obvious that opposition party will always try to make a joint decision to turn down the ruling party, but it’s the real time to observe what BJP does. From the start date of BJP’s victory, Mamata Banerjee always tried to show his power to compete with BJP. And this time also it is not the exception. Let’s see what happens after the presidential election in July 2017.
