PATNA: Even as leaders of 28 opposition parties are huddling together in Mumbai to attend the two-day meeting commencing from Thursday, the JD (U) and the RJD, the two major constituents of the Grand Alliance, have demanded that Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar should be declared the Prime Ministerial candidate.
Taking to X (formerly known as Twitter), RJD spokesperson Mrityunjay Tiwari said, “We want Nitish Kumar to be the candidate for the post of PM. If Nitish Kumar becomes the PM candidate, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will get a challenge. A decision on it will be taken by the constituents of the opposition alliance, ‘INDIA’,” he remarked.
On Wednesday, senior JD (U) leader Vashishtha Narayan Singh had said that Nitish would be the most suitable PM candidate in the present situation. “Nitish has experience of running a coalition government for long,” he had remarked while highlighting his experience as a (former) union minister.
RJD chief Lalu Prasad along with his son and Bihar deputy chief minister Tejashwi Prasad Yadav had reached Mumbai on Tuesday itself. Before leaving for Mumbai, Lalu had created a flutter in political circles by commenting “Mumbai mein Narendra Modi ke nareti pe chadhne ja rahe hain humlog. Narendra Modi ka nareti pakde huye hain hum, hatana hai (We are going to climb on the throat of Narendra Modi. We have caught hold of his throat and we have to remove him).”
Nitish has, however, recently remarked that other people would be appointed to the post of convener, adding that he had no personal desire to hold any post in the opposition alliance.
He has also on several occasions made it clear that he has no aspiration to be declared the Prime Ministerial candidate of the opposition nor was he in the race to the top post. “I want that all non-BJP parties fight unitedly against the BJP-led NDA at the centre,” he had said.
Nitish along with JD(U) president Rajiv Ranjan Singh alias Lalan Singh and water resources department minister Sanjay Kumar Jha is leaving for Mumbai in a special chartered plane to participate in the two-day meeting of Opposition parties.