Hemant swearing-in set to be Opposition’s show of strength
RANCHI: Sunday’s swearing-in ceremony of Jharkhand’s chief minister-designate Hemant Soren is expected to serve as a show of strength by top leaders of political parties opposed to the Bharatiya Janata Party at a time when the latter confronts stiff resistance to the new citizenship law it has pushed through Parliament.
Congress leaders Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi, Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati, Nationalist Congress Party’s Sharad Pawar, West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee and her Maharashtra and Delhi counterparts Uddhav Thackeray and Arvind Kejriwal will attend the event.
All of them have confirmed their attendance as have Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam president MK Stalin and Rashtriya Janata Dal leader Tejashwi
Yadav, said leaders of Soren’s Jharkhand Mukti Morcha. Former President of India Pranab Mukherjee will also attend.
JMM general secretary Supriyo Bhattacharya said Congress CMs Ashok Gehlot of Rajasthan, Kamal Nath of Madhya Pradesh and Bhupesh Baghel of Chhattisgarh would be present at the event besides former CMs
Harish Rawat, Uttarakhand and HD Kumaraswamy, Karnataka.
It would the first such gathering of opposition luminaries since the swearing-in in May 2018 of a short-lived Congress-Janata Dal (Secular) government headed by Kumaraswamy that resigned in July this year after a rebellion by some of its MLAs.
Their presence on a common stage gains significance in the context of protests that have taken place against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act and the proposed National Register of Citizens and the resistance that opposition parties have put up against Centre’s move to implement them.
“The gathering needs to be seen through the prism of the opposition against the CAA and NRC by most of the non-BJP parties.
These parties want to send out the message that a big chunk of the country’s population.. especially when assembly elections in two big states like Bihar and West Bengal are scheduled next,” said LK Kundan, who teaches political science at Ranchi University.