New Delhi:
Mulayam Singh Yadav, the chief of the Samajwadi Party, will take charge of talks to unite parties of the Janata parivar into one entity to counter the BJP. The new group is likely to be called the Samajwadi Janata Dal.
"Mulayam Singh has been authorized to work on a merger," Janata Dal United leader Nitish Kumar said today.
"We have already decided to work together. Now the next step is a merger to form one party. Mulayam Singh will proceed on that," he added.
Their first joint protest will be on December 22 against untaxed or black money stashed in foreign bank accounts.
Last month, Nitish Kumar, Lalu Yadav and HD Deve Gowda were among several leaders with common roots in the erstwhile Janata Party who met for a politically charged lunch at Mulayam Singh Yadav's home.
Unlike Mr Yadav's previous attempts to bring together non-BJP, non-Congress parties in what has often been dubbed the "Third Front", this time, Left parties were conspicuously absent.
The Janata bloc is seen as an effort by smaller parties to create a pressure or influence group to remain politically relevant after the national elections, which saw most of them fare poorly as the BJP and its partners seized a sizeable majority in the Lok Sabha.
Many of these parties had played important roles in propping up minority governments led by the BJP and the Congress for a number of years. But this year, even Mulayam Singh Yadav, whose party rules the crucial Uttar Pradesh, has won just five seats in the Lok Sabha. Nitish Kumar's JD(U), the ruling party in Bihar, has only two.