Mumbai: On Friday, the opposition I.N.D.I.A. group completed a 14-person coordination-cum-election strategy committee made up of members from several parties. This committee will serve as the alliance's top decision-making body and immediately begin working on seat sharing, according to insiders. The panel includes Congress's KC Venugopal, the NCP's Sharad Pawar, the DMK's TR Baalu, the RJD's Tejashwi Yadav, the TMC's Abhishek Banerjee, and the Shiv Sena's Sanjay Raut.
In addition to Jharkhand's Chief Minister and JMM leader, Hemant Soren, the committee also includes AAP's Raghav Chadha, Samajwadi Party's Javed Ali Khan, JD(U)'s Lalan Singh, CPI's D Raja, National Conference (NC)'s Omar Abdullah, and PDP's Mehbooba Mufti.
The communist party CPI(M) will have a representative on the panel as well, albeit the communist party has not yet announced that person's name. According to reports, the panel will begin working on seat sharing and will function as the bloc's highest decision making body. The deadline for determining who will sit where is September 30.
As part of their campaign, the opposition alliance named Congress' Gurdeep Singh Sappal, the JD(U)'s Sanjay Jha, the Shiv Sena's Anil Desai, the RJD's Sanjay Yadav, the NCP's PC Chako, the JMM's Champai Soren, the SP's Kiranmoy Nanda, the AAP's Sanjay Singh, the CPI(M)'s Arun
The TMC has yet to decide on a name for the group. The working committee for social media would have Congress' Supriya Srinate, RJD's Sumit Sharma, SP's Ashish Yadav and Rajeev Nigam, AAP's Raghav Chaddha, JMM's Avindani, Iltija Mehbooba of PDP, CPI(M)'s Pranjal, CPI's Bhalchandran Kango, Ifra Ja of the NC and V Arun Kumar of the CPI(ML) as its members.
The TMC has not yet announced who would serve as the panel's head. Manoj Jha of the RJD, Arvind Sawant of the Shiv Sena, Jitendra Ahwad of the NCP, Raghav Chaddha of the AAP, Rajiv Ranjan of the JD(U), Pranjal of the CPI(M), and Ashish Yadav of the SP will all be part of the media working group led by Congress leader Jairam Ramesh.
In addition to Mohit Bhan of the PDP and Sucheta De of the CPI(ML), the JMM includes Supriyo Bhattacharya and Alok Kumar from the JD(U), Rajeev Nigam from the SP, Bhalchandran Kango from the CPI, Tanvir Sadiq from the NC, Prashant Kanojia from the RLD, Naren Chatterjee from the AIFB, and Manish Kumar from the JMM.
TMC will announce its representative on the panel later. Another working group for research was formed with members including Amitabh Dubey of the Congress, Subodh Mehta of the RJD, Priyanka Chaturvedi of the Shiv Sena, Vandana Chavan of the NCP, KC Tyagi of the JD(U), Sudivya Kumar Sonu of the JMM, Jasmine Shah of the AAP, Alok Ranjan of the SP, Imran Nabi Dar of the NC and Aditya of the PDP.
The TMC's panel leader's name will be announced at a later time.—Inputs from Agencies