Nitish Kumar, the Chief Minister of Bihar, is working towards forming a grand alliance against the BJP by bringing together opposition parties who have no love for Congress. In his push for unity, he met with Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee in Kolkata and is scheduled to fly to Lucknow to meet Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav. However, both Trinamool Congress and SP have not been keen on sharing space with the grand old party. Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal United (JDU) has proposed the “Nitish formula” of opposition unity, which calls for a one-against-one policy in 2024. This means one seat, one candidate from the opposition against the BJP candidate, which worked in 1977 and 1989, but there’s not much confidence that the rival opposition parties can agree on a truce. The recent disqualification of Rahul Gandhi as a Lok Sabha MP precipitated a rare show of unity across opposition parties, leading to efforts to unite against the BJP picking up pace. Nitish Kumar also met with Delhi Chief Minister and Aam Aadmi Party boss Arvind Kejriwal, who is one of Congress’s harshest critics and concurred that it was “extremely necessary” for the entire opposition and the country to come together and change the government at the Centre.
