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Tara Shankar Sahay in New Delhi
Senior Communist Party of India - Marxist leader Somnath Chatterjee on Wednesday met Congress chief Sonia Gandhi in a bid to unify the fragmented opposition attack on the Vajpayee government.
Confirming the meeting between Chatterjee and Sonia, Congress spokesman S Jaipal Reddy pointed out that it was for 'floor coordination' in the Lok Sabha between the two parties.
He said the opposition was keen that there should be no let-up in its campaign to attack the government on issues like the killings by terrorists in Jammu and the United Trust of India scam.
The meeting between the CPM leader and the Congress chief assumes significance in the backdrop of CPM's boycott of the tea-party hosted by Sonia Gandhi in Parliament a couple of days back.
The Congress chief had thrown the tea-party to fine-tune with the other opposition parties the Congress-led onslaught on the Vajpayee government on various issues.
However, Chatterjee had taken care to meet Sonia before the tea-party began in his 'personal capacity' for almost half-an-hour.
The absence of the CPM from the Congress chief's tea-party was attributed in political circles to the People's Front convenor and Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav's reluctance in having any truck with the Congress.
The People's Front comprises the Left parties, the Samajwadi Party and the Rashtriya Janata Dal.
The Samajwadi Party chief, as the Front's convenor, has been consistently opposing the entry of the Congress in it.
Political observers feel that the Yadav-Sonia rivalry can be traced back to the time when Sonia, following the collapse of the erstwhile Vajpayee government, was aspiring to head a government of opposition parties.
Yadav staunchly opposed Sonia's move, resulting in the coveted post of the prime minister eluding the Congress chief.
Ever since, the Congress and the Samajwadi party have often opposed each other, at the expense of the overall opposition unity.
"Despite a few differences between the opposition parties, we don't want the communal government of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to go scot-free from its omissions and commissions. The Agra fiasco and the UTI scam are just two issues on which we want to take this government to task," Chatterjee told rediff.com
Samajwadi Party general secretary Amar Singh voiced similar sentiments.
"The opposition may not necessarily agree on all issues. But that does not mean that the opposition parties will spare this government, which has been indulging in scams galore without a thought about the poor and the downtrodden."
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