'WE KNOW WHAT'S AT STAKE; CAN'T FAIL ON ALLIANCES'

Senior Congress leader and former Union minister Salman Khurshid takes questions on variety of issues, including the INDIA bloc, in the 11th edition of Delhi Dialogues

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SALMAN Khurshid is an advocate, eminent author, and a law teacher at Oxford. He replies to a range of questions beginning with opposition INDIA alliance seat-sharing talks to India’s foreign policy and the recent laws passed by Parliament. Excerpts:

Shahid Faridi: General elections are round the corner. The Prime Minister is hoping to score a hattrick. The opposition INDIA bloc is engaged in seat-sharing talks. Whether the opposition will be able to mount a challenge depends on a successful seat-sharing pact among the opposition parties. You are part of the Congress committee for alliances. How are the talks going?

I have some views about what we are trying to deal with. As far as we are concerned, we have a very specific, confined mandate. It’s only about ensuring that seat-sharing is done quickly and in a manner that leaves us with a greater sense of friendship than what we began with.

We’ve taken feedback from some of our state-level leaders. In one or two states, things are a bit complicated. As discussions proceed in days to come, we’ll have an idea of the extent of agreement, and the sticking points. We’ll then go back to the party leadership on how we should proceed further.

We are all in a learning process. I hope our alliance partners too are doing the same. Some of them have more experience in forming alliances than we have. We have to be careful that we don’t appear novices, but at the same time, we don’t appear to be too rigid. We are flexible, and yet, we are not pushovers.

In four to five days, we will know, I guess, how tough this task is, how, viable it is.