Sharad Pawar to hold meeting of non-Congress opposition parties on June 22: Reports

NCP chief Sharad Pawar (File image: PTI)

Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar will host a meeting of non-Congress opposition parties on June 22, news reports suggest.

The meeting is likely to happen at 4 pm and invitations have been extended to 15 political parties, Times Now reported.

While the agenda of the meeting was not immediately clear, speculation is rife that the former union minister is trying to stitch together an alliance of opposition parties with an eye on the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

The development came on a day Pawar met political strategist Prashant Kishor for the second time in around two weeks.

Kishor had met Pawar at the latter's residence in Mumbai on June 11. The meeting had reportedly gone on for three hours. Their second meeting on June 21 lasted half an hour, NDTV reported.

Earlier, news reports had suggested that Pawar is working to help put up a joint opposition candidate to take on Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the next general election and that many smaller parties have indicated their willingness to join such an arrangement.

Pawar’s NCP runs a coalition government in Maharashtra along with Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena and the Congress. A number of non-Congress opposition parties currently hold power in states like West Bengal, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and Odisha. Congress also backs the governing Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) in Tamil Nadu and the CM Hemant Soren's Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) in Jharkhand.

Meanwhile, news agency ANI reported that Congress interim President Sonia Gandhi has also called a meeting of the party's general secretaries, state in-charges and state unit chiefs on June 24, through video conferencing, to discuss the current political situation.

(This is a developing story. Please check back for updates)