With two more phases to go for the ongoing Lok Sabha elections and the date for the declaration of the verdict not far away (May 23), new and interesting political calculations and gambits are being worked out by the mainstream as well as regional parties, even as pre-poll alliances already stand cemented.
While the two national parties, BJP and Congress, are likely to lead their respective fronts NDA and UPA, the murmurs of a third-front are getting visibly louder. Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan held a closed door meeting on Monday with Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao at his official residence at the Cliff House in Thiruvananthapuram. Also present were TRS MPs Santosh Kumar and Vinod Kumar.
The meeting reportedly lasted for two hours.
It is understood that the conspicuous by its absence as yet third-front is the brainchild of the Telangana chief minister, seconded by his Kerala counterpart, and they want to go for a non-Congress, non-BJP prime minister, most preferably from south India, such as HD Deve Gowda of the United Front (1996) who was the 11th Prime Minister (1996-97) of India.
Both the chief ministers did not make public the agenda of the meeting, except that the two discussed the issues of national and states’ interest.
On a two-day visit to Kerala, along with his wife Shobha and their two grandchildren, Rao is staying at Kovalam, a famous tourist destination, from where he will travel to Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu on May 8, according to a statement issued from the Telangana Chief Minister’s Office (CMO), which further said he would call on DMK president MK Stalin at his residence in Chennai on May 13.
(With PTI inputs)