Election Fallout: I.N.D.I.A. Leaders Meet Postponed

New Delhi: After the rout of the Congress in the Hindi heartland, the I.N.D.I.A. bloc of the Opposition parties seems to be tottering and has postponed the meeting scheduled for Wednesday to an unspecified date, after some op Opposition leaders, including Chief Ministers Nitish Kumar, Mamata Banerjee, M.K. Stalin and Hemant Soren and Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav decided to give it a miss.

Instead, a 14-member coordination committee of the bloc will meet at Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge’s residence on December 6, said Gurdeep Singh Sappal, coordinator of Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge’s office. “Thereafter, a meeting of the party presidents/heads of the I.N.D.I.A. bloc will be held in the third week of December at a date convenient to all,” Sappal said in a post on X.

Seat-sharing for the Lok Sabha polls, which are just four months away, is likely to be on top of the agenda of the meeting. The next I.N.D.I.A. bloc meeting would also be crucial for the Congress, particularly as the party lost the Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh elections, the Hindi heartland states that send a large number of members to the Lok Sabha.