NEW DELHI: On the day the Opposition INDIA bloc will hold seat-sharing talks at its fourth coordination committee meeting here on Decmber 19, AAP’s national convenor Arvind Kejriwal will leave for a Vipassana meditation session at an undisclosed location for 10 days.
The Chief Minister’s Office informed that Kejriwal will be unavailable from December 19 to 30 as he is due to participate in his annual Vipassana retreat. Vipassana sessions mandate that the participant stays out of contact with the outer world and observes complete silence.
Kejriwal’s itinerary became known a day after the Congress announced the date of the INDIA meeting.
There were some who sought to infer that the AAP may be playing hardball in sharing Lok Sabha seats with the Congress in Delhi and Punjab.
With the Congress losing power in Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan and failing to wrest Madhya Pradesh in the recent assembly elections, it lost its bargaining chip for more Lok Sabha constituencies from allies like the AAP.
However, there is no official word on Kejriwal attending or skipping the INDIA meeting. Sources close to him merely said he would leave for the Vipassana meditation centre on Tuesday (December 19) evening.
It was also not clear if Kejriwal would depute someone else from his party for the meeting. But since Raghav Chaddha has just been appointed the leader of the AAP in the Rajya Sabha, he could be deputed in place of Sanjay Singh who is under the Enforcement Diectorate’s custody in a money laundering case related to alleged irregularities in the now-scrapped Delhi excise policy.
The meeting of 26 Opposition parties will take place at Ashoka Hotel. It was originally scheduled to be held in Parliament House but was moved out on account of the clampdown on media access after the latest Lok Sabha intrusion.