IANS/Patna

Congress president Sonia Gandhi and chief ministers of Delhi, West Bengal, Odisha and Uttar Pradesh will attend the November 20 oath-taking ceremony of Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar in an event which is being touted as the beginning of opposition unity against the Bharatiya Janata Party.
Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi and former prime minister H D Deve Gowda will also attend the event along with Assam’s Congress Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi. So will former chief ministers Babulal Marandi and Hemant Soren of Jharkhand and Indian National Lok Dal leader Abhay Chautala from Haryana.
“We have decided to invite all leaders opposed to the BJP to attend the ceremony,” Janata Dal-United (JD-U) spokesman Ajay Alok said here yesterday.
JD-U general secretary K C Tyagi said all the senior leaders opposed to the BJP’s brand of politics would come together in the first major show of opposition unity since Narendra Modi became prime minister in May 2014.
“It will be a new beginning of opposition unity,” he said.
The Grand Alliance led by Nitish Kumar, who will take oath as chief minister for a third straight time, includes the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) of Lalu Prasad Yadav and the Congress. It crushed the BJP and its allies, winning 178 of the 243 assembly seats.
The chief ministers expected to attend are Akhilesh Yadav (Samajwadi Party, Uttar Pradesh), Naveen Patnaik (Biju Janata Dal, Odisha), Arvind Kejriwal (Aam Aadmi Party, Delhi) and Mamata Banerjee (Trinamool Congress, West Bengal).
Lalu Prasad, whose RJD is the single largest party in the new Bihar assembly, and JD-U president Sharad Yadav will be the main guests at the event.
Nitish Kumar on Wednesday said he would recommend the dissolution of the state assembly tomorrow after holding a last meeting of his cabinet. He will stake claim to form his new government after a joint meeting of the Grand Alliance that day.
According to JD-U leaders here, Nitish Kumar will take oath along with a 36-member council of ministers after the Chhath festival in the third week of November.
In the Grand Alliance, the RJD won 80 seats followed by the JD-U with 71 and the Congress with 27 seats. There will be 16 ministers from the RJD, 15 from the JD-U and five from the Congress.
Meanwhile, popular Telugu actor and Jana Sena chief Pawan Kalyan warned the BJP that it would suffer a setback in Andhra Pradesh if it failed to fulfill the promises made to the state.
After a nearly three-hour meeting with Telugu Desam president and Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu, he told reporters that they discussed a few issues, including the special category status to the state.
TDP is an ally of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance central government.
Pawan recalled that the special status was promised in parliament and Prime Minister Narendra Modi had assured the state that the promise would be fulfilled.
The actor said they would wait for the central government and Modi to act on the issue before planning their response.
Pawan floated the Jana Sena on the eve of the 2014 general elections. The party did not contest the elections but he campaigned for the TDP-BJP alliance in both Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.
The younger brother of superstar and Congress leader Chiranjeevi is not happy with the NDA for the delay in according special status to Andhra Pradesh.
In a series of tweets in August, Pawan had reminded Modi of his election promise to do justice to Andhra Pradesh.
Political observers say that in the wake of the BJP’s crushing defeat in the Bihar elections, Naidu may mount pressure on Modi to grant special status and honour all other commitments made in the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act.