Kolkata: In an interesting development, senior Congress leader P. Chidambaram dropped in at the West Bengal Secretariat ‘Nabanna’ on Thursday evening and had a 40-minute-long closed-door meeting with Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.
Although neither the Chief Minister nor the Congress leader spoke to media persons about the subjects of discussion at the meeting, Trinamool Congress insiders said that the two leaders probably discussed the strategy to be adopted by the opposition INDIA bloc in the forthcoming session of the Parliament.
Political observers feel that the meeting is significant in the way that it hints about the top leadership of the two parties coming closer again leaving behind the bitterness over the Lok Sabha elections between the state unit of Congress and the ruling Trinamool.
Now with the state Congress President Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, who had always been known for his hardcore anti-Trinamool stand, having himself lost in the polls from Baharampur, the road has become smoother for both Congress and Trinamool for future floor coordination in the Lok Sabha.
In fact, in the past too, the personal equation between Banerjee and Chidambaram had been extremely cordial, with the latter often holding the brief of the state government in important court cases both at the Supreme Court and the Calcutta High Court. Often, Chidambaram and his fellow Congressman and senior advocate Abhsihek Manu Singhvi had earned the ire of the state Congress leadership for holding briefs on behalf of the state government and a number of Trinamool leaders but remained unfazed.
(IANS)
