Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin is in Delhi for a three day visit and on Thursday, met Prime Minister Narendra Modi, while also having a surprise visitor when Congress President Sonia Gandhi, walked into the DMK office in the Parliament to meet him.
Stalin, who is also the DMK chief, is in Delhi to inaugurate the party office in the national capital, but the visit comes on heels of the visit of his Odisha counterpart and Biju Janata Dal chief Naveen Patnaik.
The non-BJP Chief Minister are making a beeline to the national capital as the Presidential elections are slated in June-July.
Incidentally, T.R. Balu from the DMK had met Patnaik during his visit to the Parliament. However, Patnaik, asked about his BJD's preferences in the presidential polls, did not give an unequivocal answer. "There is still time for the Presidential elections so no thoughts on that for the moment," he said.
Telangana Chief Minister and TRS leader K. Chandrasekhar Rao has also been active and had met his West Bengal and Maharashtra counterparts, Mamata Banerjee and Uddhav Thackeray, respectively. Non-BJP or Congress Chief Ministers and leaders can influence Presidential polls as the Congress is reduced to only two states and its strength has reduced in Punjab, Goa, UP, and Manipur.
The BJP has a majority in the Parliament, but in terms of big states - which are key in the election, has seen its strength reduced in UP while several other big states are ruled by opposition parties, whose unity can make the situation tense for the party.
In fact, Banerjee, who heads the Trinamool Congress, had warned the BJP that the Presidential election will not be an easy task for it because they don't have even half of the legislators of the country.
The electoral college, comprising 776 MPs of both the Houses and 4,120 MLAs of all the states and Union Territories, has 1,098,903 votes, and a majority is 549,452 votes. As far as the value of votes is concerned, Uttar Pradesh has the highest number of votes, approximately 83,824, followed by Maharashtra and West Bengal.