Pune (Maharashtra) [India], June 29 : The next meeting of Opposition leaders has been shifted from Shimla to Bengaluru owing to the prevailing weather conditions in Himachal Pradesh, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar informed on Thursday.
Addressing a press conference in Pune on Thursday, the NCP patriarch said, "Owing to prevailing wet weather and heavy rainfall in Himachal Pradesh, the venue of the meeting (of Opposition leaders) has been shifted from Shimla to Bengaluru. The meeting would be held on July 13 and 14."
He informed further that the decision on shifting the grand Opposition meeting was taken on Thursday.
In the inaugural meeting earlier in Patna, top Opposition leaders, including Pawar, Bihar Chief Minister and Janata Dal United (JDU) chief Nitish Kumar, Congress's Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi, and West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee, among others, had resolved to put up a united fight against the BJP government at the Centre in next year's Lok Sabha elections.
At a joint press conference after the meeting, the Congress national president announced that the Opposition parties would carry forward the process of building a rainbow alliance against the Centre at their next meeting in Shimla.
Kharge had said the agenda before the next Opposition meeting, the second of its kind after Patna, would be to flesh out a roadmap on moving ahead together "while working in our respective states to fight BJP in 2024".
"At this meeting, the future plan of action on how to go forward in the upcoming (Lok Sabha) election would be discussed. The discussion will also be centred on how power is misused to stoke communal tension in states," Pawar said on Thursday.
The NCP chief claimed further that in Opposition-ruled states, especially Left-ruled Kerala and Congress-ruled Himachal Pradesh, the BJP has failed to make any meaningful political inroads and had not received any support from the people.
"The BJP is not in power in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Rajasthan, Punjab, Delhi, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Jharkhand, and West Bengal," he said in support of his argument.
Pawar claimed further that Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was on his maiden State visit to the United States when the first Opposition meeting took place, grew restless after learning of it.
His remark came in response to PM Modi's claim on Tuesday in Bhopal that the Opposition leaders are unsettled as they have come to realise that the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) was on course to win the 2024 general elections.
"Wo baukhala gaye hain (They have become flustered). So, they have started to hold meetings... A few days ago a photo session was organised by them (Opposition) and if you see the photographs, you will realise that every person in the photo has their own history of scams. Every photo is a guarantee of corruption and scams. Everyone together is a guarantee of at least Rs 20 lakh crore corruption. Congress alone has carried out scams worth lakhs of crores. The RJD, TMC, NCP all of them have a long list of scams," PM Modi said while addressing party booth workers in Bhopal on Tuesday.
Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor