Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar is likely to meet his Odisha counterpart Naveen Patnaik on Tuesday, as part of efforts to bring all non-NDA parties together, highly placed sources said here.
They said the JD(U) supreme leader is likely to leave for Bhubaneswar in the forenoon and fly back by the evening. The chief minister's office confirmed that the meeting will take place Tuesday afternoon.
Speculations about Kumar's meeting with Patnaik, who heads the Biju Janata Dal, have been doing the rounds for quite some time. The Bihar CM, who snapped ties with BJP last year, vowing to defeat it in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, has toured many places and met political leaders of various hues as part of his "opposition unity drive".
Recently, he held talks with West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav. Earlier, he had met former Congress president Rahul Gandhi, NCP chief Sharad Pawar and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, among others.
Patnaik, one of the longest serving CMs of any state in the country, is, like Kumar, a former BJP ally. He has tried to remain equidistant from the Congress and the BJP. When Kumar had met Banerjee, he was asked by her to convene a meeting, in Bihar, of leaders from across the country who are opposed to the BJP.
Kumar has hinted that such a meeting could take place after the Karnataka assembly elections. Campaign has ended in the state which goes to polls on Wednesday while results would be declared on Saturday.
