Mulayam and Akhilesh Singh Yadav have no plan to meet Mamata Banerjee

KOLKATA: Socialist Party (SP) chief Mulayam Singh Yadav and Uttar Pradesh Chief minister Akhilesh Singh Yadav have no plan to meet the chief minister Mamata Banerjee. The two leaders are currently in the city to attend the national conference of the party and they will be here till Thursday afternoon.

The SP leader and former West Bengal fisheries minister Kiranmoy Nanda told ET on Tuesday that "both the leaders will be busy attending the party meeting from Wednesday morning. Our conference will start at 9 a.m. and will be over at 8 p.m. On Thursday, the session will be over at around 12 noon and after that both the leaders will fly to Lucknow. Naturally, possibility of meeting the chief minister seems very remote."

Chief minister's office also said that there was no official appointments between the chief minister and her counterpart in Uttar Pradesh and the SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav either on Wednesday or Thursday.

Political circles here were expecting Mulayam to meet Mamata Banerjee and discuss about the possibility of floating a third political alternative at the national level.

But information given by Nanda suggests that the two SP leaders are not meeting the chief minister. Mamata and her party Trinamool Congress had suffered a jolt after Mulayam Singh Yadav's sudden U-turn about fielding a presidential candidate against Pranab Mukherjee.

Both Mamata and Mulayam had announced to field their candidate for the presidential election. But Mulayam later took a sudden U-turn and supported Pranab Mukherjee's candidature.

This had certainly upset Mamata Banerjee who in course of time, also had supported Mukherjee. But bilateral relation of Trinamool Congress and SP has certainly deteriorated over the issue of presidential polls and both the camps are trying to maintain a distance from each other.

This is for the fourth time that the SP has been holding their national conference in Kolkata. The three previous conferences of the party, had, however, taken place during the regime of the previous Left Front government. Interestingly, SP is still a constituent of the opposition Left Front in West Bengal.