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Left, BSP, regional parties to launch joint campaign

NEW DELHI: Four Left parties, along with the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and five regional parties, on Wednesday decided to launch a joint national level campaign against relentless price rise, agrarian distress, the India-United States nuclear deal, communal forces, and “gross” misuse of government institutions like the CBI for political purposes.

This was announced by Communist Party of India (Marxist) general secretary Prakash Karat after a two-and-half-hour meeting of the 10 parties at the New Delhi residence of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati.

Besides the CPI(M) and the BSP, parties that attended the meeting were the CPI, the Forward Bloc, the RSP, the Telugu Desam Party, the Janata Dal (Secular), the Rashtriya Lok Dal, the Indian National Lok Dal and the Jharkhand Vikas Morcha.

In a joint statement, the 10 parties said that the United Progressive Alliance government “has lost the trust of the nation in the immoral manner” in which it engineered the win in the trust vote in Parliament on Tuesday. They said the Manmohan government had lost its moral authority.

Would he define this coming together of the 10 parties as a pre-poll alliance, a third alternative or a temporary arrangement? Mr. Karat said: “We have come together to conduct a campaign; the rest will be decided later.” A committee had been set up to launch nation-wide campaigns.

The former Prime Minister and Janata Dal(Secular) president H. D. Deve Gowda said he would support this initiative. His son, H. D. Kumaraswamy, told reporters ahead of the meeting that his party would stand behind Ms. Mayawati in future.

RLD president Ajit Singh said this front would be the real alternative to the UPA.

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