Picture : Twitter / ANI
The leaders of 19 political parties have said they will organise joint protests and demonstrations across the country from September 20 to 30 even as they urged the people of the country to save India for a better tomorrow. After a virtual meeting of the Opposition parties, where they stressed on unitedly moving forward to defeat the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, the leaders also put out an 11-point charter of demands before the government.
The meeting was chaired by Congress president Sonia Gandhi virtually with leaders of 19 Opposition parties, including the chief ministers of some Opposition-ruled states, amid efforts to boost Opposition unity and evolve a common strategy against the National Democratic Alliance government.
A total of 19 parties are participating in the meeting: The Congress, TMC, NCP, DMK, Shiv Sena, JMM, Communist Party of India, CPI-M, National Conference, Rashtriya Janata Dal, All India United Democratic Front, Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi, Loktantrik Janata Dal, Janata Dal-Secular, Rashtriya Lok Dal, Revolutionary Socialist Party, Kerala Congress-Mani, People’s Democratic Party and the Indian Union Muslim League.
“We will jointly organise protest actions all over the country from 20th to 30th September, 2021,” they said in a statement. The leaders said the forms of these public protest actions will be decided by the respective state units of their parties, depending on the concrete conditions of the Covid regulations and protocols in the states. These forms, amongst others, may include dharnas, protest demonstrations and hartals, they said in the joint statement.
Among the leaders who took part in the meeting were National Conference’s Farooq Abdullah, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam’s MK Stalin, Trinamool Congress’s Mamata Banerjee, Jharkhand Mukti Morcha’s Hemant Soren, Shiv Sena’s Uddhav Thackeray, Nationalist Congress Party’s Sharad Pawar, Loktantrik Janata Dal’s Sharad Yadav Communist Party of India-Marxist’s Sitaram Yechury. Former prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh and Rahul Gandhi .
“We, the leaders of 19 Opposition parties, call upon the people of India to rise to the occasion to defend our secular, democratic, republican order with all our might. Save India today, so that we can change it for a better tomorrow,” they said. The leaders also strongly condemned the manner in which the Centre and the ruling BJP disrupted the Monsoon Session of Parliament, refusing to discuss the alleged illegal usage of the Pegasus military spyware to conduct unauthorised surveillance, a repeal of three “anti-farmer” laws, the gross mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic, inflation and price rise as also the spiralling unemployment. All these and many other issues affecting the country and its people were deliberately ignored by the government, they alleged.
