There may be few takers for Congress chief Sonia Gandhi’s coalition offer among the non-NDA parties but CPI-M’s parliamentary party leader Somnath Chatterjee’s meeting of the Opposition parties today saw a new entrant — the National Conference’s Omar Abdullah.Having parted ways with the NDA, Abdullah Junior made an appearance at the regular strategy meeting of the Opposition’s coordination committee which targeted the government’s Iraq policy vis-a-vis the ongoing US operation there and for going against the spirit of the parliamentary resolution which had asked the US to pull out from Iraq.The overall mood of the Opposition was reflected at the meeting in that the members decided to keep up the pressure on the Government for dropping charges against Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani and HRD Minister Murli Manohar Joshi in the Babri Masjid demolition case .Justifying the NC’s inclusion in the Opposition meeting, Chatterjee said that his party’s alliance with the Mufti government in the J-K does not come in the way of Omar’s attending the Opposition meeting for better coordination within Parliament.Coming straight out of the adjourned Lok Sabha, Chatterjee reiterated the Opposition demands for Advani and Joshi’s resignation and hit out at the Government for misusing the CBI to protect the ministers.‘‘The Prime Minister should explain how the charge was dropped in the new chargesheet. The dropping of the charge was only meant to get the Deputy Prime Minister and others were being exonerated,’’ Chatterjee said, debunking Law Minister Arun Jaitley’s argument that the criminal conspiracy charges were not included in the FIRs.‘‘The FIR is a preliminary document and further investigations are required on it. And the original chargesheet filed by the CBI and not the FIR contained the criminal conspiracy charge,’’ he added.Accusing Jaitley of ‘‘deliberately suppressing facts by only harping on the FIRs’’, Chatterjee said the Law Minister’s statements yesterday did not mean anything as he was neither concerned with fighting the case nor was he in charge of the investigating agency.
