New Delhi: In a Dalit versus Dalit contest, former Lok Sabha Speaker and onetime diplomat Meira Kumar, daughter of the late Scheduled Caste icon Babu Jagjivan Ram, will take on the NDA’s Ram Nath Kovind in next month’s presidential election, a 17-party conglomerate of Opposition parties decided Thursday. The high point of the unfolding drama was Nationalist Congress Party supremo Sharad Pawar, who decided to play along with the Opposition bloc after dithering till the last moment and agreed only after much persuasion by senior leaders.
“Seventeen Opposition parties have together decided to jointly field Ms Meira Kumar,” Congress president Sonia Gandhi said after a one-and-a-half-hour-long meeting. Mrs Gandhi was flanked by former PM Manmohan Singh and Mr Pawar, who held several meetings within his party as well as with Congress troubleshooters Ghulam Nabi Azad and Ahmed Patel, and CPM’s Sitaram Yechury. Sources said though Mr Pawar had agreed to be on the Opposition side in the presidential battle, he had wanted the decision to announce the name of the candidate to be deferred by at least a day.
