Mamata Banerjee has said that all the leaders converging in the Bihar capital on Friday are coming together to fight the BJP as a collective family.

After landing in Patna to attend Friday’s congregation of non-BJP leaders, hosted by Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar, the Bengal chief minister proceeded to meet RJD national president Lalu Prasad.

“I am very happy after meeting Lalu Ji. He is a senior leader. After seeing him I can feel he is strong enough to take on the BJP. We have come to fight together, just like a collective family,” said Mamata.

After the Lalu-Mamata meeting, Nitish called on the Bengal chief minister in the evening at the Circuit House.

Besides Mamata and Nitish, Friday’s meeting is scheduled to be attended by Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi (Congress), Sharad Pawar (NCP),Tamil Nadu chief minister M.K. Stalin (DMK), Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal (AAP), Akhilesh Yadav (Samajwadi Party), Uddhav Thackeray (Shiv Sena, Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray), Farooq Abdullah (National Conference) and Mehbooba Mufti (People’s Democratic Party). Left leaders like Sitaram Yechury are also expected to attend the meeting.

The Patna experiment, however, is not the first of its kind. The Bengal chief minister had herself tried tostitch together an alliance of sorts against the BJP ahead of the last Lok Sabha polls.

Mamata had hosted leaders of 23 Opposition parties at a meeting on the Brigade Parade Grounds on January 19, 2019, to put up a united fight against the Narendra Modi government to “restore democracy” and “protect the Constitution”.

The Calcutta experiment, however, drew a blank and the BJP returned to power with a thumping majority in the 2019 elections.

Unlike the last attempt, which began barely four-and-a-half months before the big battle, the process to bring most of the non-BJP Opposition parties together has begun well in advance this time. The Opposition leaders, despite their differences on a gamut of issues, also seem more organised -- and determined, at least in intent.

However, the answer to the key question that Arun Shourie, a former BJP minister-turned-critic of Modi, had asked at the Brigade show still remains hazy for a variety of reasons, ranging from Kejriwal’s insistence on discussing the central ordinance to the Delhi law of 1991 to Mamata’s reservations about taking the Left parties on board in the fight against the BJP.

The index of Opposition unity will hinge on the extent to which the Congress accommodates the regional parties to ensure a one-to-one fight against the BJP.

“People have lost confidence in Modi-Shah. But people have to be given the confidence that you will remain together,” Shourie told the Opposition leaders on January 19, 2019, when they held aloft their entwined hands at the Brigade Parade Grounds.

A source close to Mamata said the biggest lesson from the outcome of the 2019 experiment was the Opposition’s failure to send out a message that they would sort out their differences and stay together.

On his part, Nitish has plastered Patna with hoardings and flex banners featuring Opposition leaders to stress the message of unity. Team Nitish has also been working hard to ensure that prickly issues, like contradictions within the Opposition ranks, do not surface at the meeting on Friday.

While these attempts have given a glimmer of hope to the anti-BJP camp, the road ahead is littered with challenges.

Former Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda had identified the challenges at the Brigade Parade Grounds meeting, specifically cautioning that any problems over seat-sharing among the Opposition parties could derail the entire exercise.

“Arriving at a consensus on seat-sharing is very difficult. It’s a Herculean task.... Now, there is no JP (Jaya Prakash Narayan), no Acharya Kripalani (who played a role in bringing Opposition parties together against Indira Gandhi),” the former Prime Minister had said in Calcutta in January 2019.

He had also made it clear that a one-off show of unity would not be enough and the idea of a united fight against the BJP would remain on paper unless the Opposition leaders met regularly and worked out a fool-proof plan.

A source close to Mamata said she clearly remembered what Gowda had said at the Brigade rally and that’s why she had proposed Patna as the venue. The Bengal chief minister has told her close aides several times in the last few weeks — citing how JP’s movement had begun in Patna but reverberated in the national capital — that Patna was the best possible launching pad if one wanted to have an impact in Delhi.

The Bihar capital may indeed have a historical significance in the matter of bringing about a change in Delhi, but the fact remains that the Opposition parties badly need a JP or an Acharya Kripalani to ensure a united fight against the Modi regime.

“It’s a work in progress and a lot needs to be done to achieve the common objective…. You can’t expect everything from tomorrow’s meeting. The positive this time is that we are still around 11 months away from the next election. If the leaders reiterate their objective tomorrow and agree on the date and the venue of the next meeting, that itself would be a big achievement,” a source in Team Nitish said on Thursday.