Tweet
Cong meet to mollify allies ahead of Winter Session
Under pressure from its allies as well as the Opposition over a plethora of issues, the Congress will hold a meeting with its coalition partners in the UPA Government before the Parliament session beginning on November 22.
“We will sit with our allies over dinner or lunch before the Parliament session begins,” Congress sources said thereby indicating that the party will try to mollify the alliance partners who are miffed with the Manmohan Singh Government for not taking them into confidence before taking crucial decisions.
The Government is already apprehending that the Winter Session will be stormy with Opposition — both Left parties and BJP — will leave no stone unturned to corner the Government on soaring inflation, which is fueled by repeated price hike of petroleum products, as well as corruption and black money. Also team Anna will make all out effort to target the Government on the issue of corruption and demand passage of the Jan Lokpal Bill during the session.
In such a scenario it cannot afford to alienate its own alliance partners many of them have openly expressed their displeasure over their voices not being heard while Trinamool Congress Chief Mamata Banerjee had openly revolted and even threatened to quit the government over repeated petrol price hike. She had vociferously demanded setting of a Coordination Committee.
DMK is already unhappy over party MP Kanimozhi not getting bail in the 2G spectrum scam case while National Conference is on a confrontation mode with the Centre on the issue on AFSPA. All these parties along with Nationalist Congress Party had expressed their displeasure over the repeated petrol price hike and threatened to raise the matter in the cabinet.
Though Mamata has for the time being softened her approach after the Tuesday meeting of Trinamool MPs with the Prime Minister, she has already indicated that she will re-think her decision in case of future petrol price hike or if the prices of LPG and diesel are tinkered with.
The government has rejected demand for Coordination Committee on the ground that the alliance partners in the UPA II are in the Union Cabinet and they are also represented in the Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs unlike UPA I when the Left parties were giving outside support, but it realizes that if its own coalition partners remained angry they along with opposition could create an embarrassing situation in the Parliament.
So it wants to have dialogue with them so that a proper strategy could be devised to unitedly counter the opposition attack which is sure to intensify in the coming days.
