Kharge named INDIA bloc chief, Nitish says will accept convener role after consensus

Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge was appointed as the chairperson of the Opposition INDIA alliance at its virtual meeting here on Saturday. The INDIA bloc also picked Bihar Chief Minister and Janata Dal (United) president Nitish Kumar as its convener, but he has “temporarily chosen to withdraw from the alliance’s convener race on the ground that he would only accept it if there is a consensus among allies,” sources told The Indian Express.

Sources said that Trinamool Congress (TMC) supremo and West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee and Samajwadi Party (SP) president Akhilesh Yadav skipped today’s meeting.

The meeting, sources said, was attended virtually by heads of a slew of parties who are members of the bloc’s coordination committee, including Kharge, NCP president Sharad Pawar, DMK president and Tamil Nadu CM M K Stalin and AAP convener and Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal.

Days after the TMC refused to join seat-sharing talks with the Congress’s national alliance committee, the party had said Friday it would not attend today’s meeting. Earlier this week, the TMC signalled it was willing to concede two or three seats to the Congress in Bengal — an offer which the state Congress rejected.

The leaders of some of the INDIA bloc parties said the TMC was not really enthusiastic about the idea of appointing Kumar as the convener.

For weeks the JD(U) had been of the view that Kharge should be appointed as the chairperson of the alliance and Kumar the convener — a North-South combination that it felt would send a positive signal to the people in the absence of a prime ministerial face for the bloc in the upcoming Lok Sabha polls.

The Congress had not been keen on heading the alliance as it knew that some of the regional parties were not