Mission 2024: Nitish Kumar, Tejashwi to meet Kharge, RaGa today

After meeting Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Sunday, Bihar CM Nitish Kumar and Deputy CM Tejashwi Yadav are set to meet Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi on Monday. They are likely to finalize the date for the opposition leaders' conclave to be held in the next few weeks in Bihar's Patna, as suggested by West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee.

• Kumar, the Janata Dal (United) chief, is on a mission to unite the opposition ahead of the Lok Sabha elections to prevent the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from winning a third consecutive term.
• The opposition parties tried to forge a joint front earlier, with little success.
• However, Kumar's call for a "one-on-one" strategy for 2024 seems to have brought opposition quarters into accord.

On Sunday, Bihar's top duo supported the Aam Aadmi Party's (AAP) government in Delhi in its tussle against the BJP-led Centre after the latter brought an ordinance to bypass a Supreme Court order confirming the Delhi government's power over its bureaucracy. The opposition parties are hoping to fight together by pitting a joint candidate against the BJP's candidates to prevent the division of votes.

The duo is likely to meet the Congress's leaders and share the details of the talks they had with other opposition leaders. Apart from Banerjee and Kejriwal, Kumar met Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Akhilesh Yadav, Odisha CM Naveen Patnaik, Jharkhand CM Hemant Soren, Shiv Sena's Uddhav Thackeray, and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar over the last month.

Kumar and Yadav met with Kharge and Gandhi last month, after which the JD(U) chief decided to reportedly reach out to the parties that don't have a good equation with the Congress. Kumar also met Communist Party of India-Marxist's (CPI-M) Sitaram Yechury and CPI's D Raja. However, he hasn't yet met Telangana CM K Chandrashekar Rao and Andhra Pradesh CM Jagan Mohan Reddy.