With the stir against Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) spreading across the country, Congress president Sonia Gandhi has called a meeting of like-minded Opposition parties on Monday to frame a ‘joint action plan’ against the CAA and proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC). West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and BSP chief Mayawati has decided to skip the meeting.
The Congress Working Committee (CWC) on Saturday had discussed the party’s organisational and political response to the Modi Government’s attempt to push CAA in the States, would deliberate with “friendly” Opposition parties the current political situation.
Congress spokesperson Jairam Ramesh said Monday’s meeting “will further discuss the emerging situation”. Leaders of around a dozen Opposition parties, including DMK, RJD, NCP, Samajwadi Party and Left parties are expected to attend meeting.
Though several Chief Ministers in the country have pronounced that they could not allow implementation of the CAA, the Opposition has not been able to consolidate its unity despite the momentum provided to it by the campus unrest against it and backing it received by assorted sections of the society, including the film-world.
Unsettled by the clashes between the workers of the Left and her Trinamool Congress during last week’s trade union strike, Banerjee announced that she would absent herself from the Opposition meeting. While almost denouncing the meet, the TMC chief said the meeting was her brain-child.
“What happened yesterday in the State — it is no more possible for me to attend the meeting anymore,” she had said, announcing her boycott of the Delhi deliberations.
“I was the first to launch an andolan (movement) against CAA, NRC,” she added. “What the Left and the Congress are doing in the name of the CAA-NRC is not a movement but vandalism,” she said.
Mamata who had earlier called for a wider Opposition unity against the Modi-Government’s contentious CAA has chosen to exclude herself.
Mayawati, too, had attacked Sonia and Congress General Secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra recently days over the deaths of infants at a hospital in the Congress-ruled Rajasthan’s Kota.
The BSP leader who has split with SP post-Lok Sabha polls said if the “woman general secretary of the Congress” would not visit Kota to meet the mothers who lost their children, then her meetings with families of victims in Uttar Pradesh will be considered for “political interest and drama”.
On Saturday, Congress chief Sonia Gandhi described the citizenship law a “discriminatory and divisive” law whose “sinister” purpose was to divide people on religious lines. “The CAA is a discriminatory and divisive law. The sinister purpose of the law is clear to every patriotic, tolerant and secular Indian: it is to divide the Indian people on religious lines,” she said at a meeting of the CWC and sought its withdrawal.