NEW DELHI: Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi on Thursday reached out to the CPI leadership to convey his party’s agreement and support for a broader unity of parties to take on the BJP and the Modi government.Gandhi’s reach out came on a day when a delegation of the CPI Central Secretariat met with CPM Polit Bureau members to formally convey its central executive’s decision to pitch for a broader platform of democratic, secular and Left parties to face the saffron challenge.Gandhi telephoned CPI central secretariat member D Raja on Thursday morning and invited him for an informal meeting at the Congress Parliamentary Party office, where he conveyed his party’s support for CPI’s initiative for building a broader platform of secular, democratic and Left parties to fight the surging might of the BJP and Modi government.Incidentally, ET had reported on Thursday about the CPI’s decision and how it amounted to the party pitching for a tactical cooperation with the Congress for ushering in a pre-2004 Lok Saba poll-like unity of anti-BJP parties.According to a person privy to the meeting, Gandhi said the Congress too shared concerns over the ‘growing communal agenda’ of Modi government and BJP and the need for a broader unity of secular and democratic parties in the run up to the next Lok Sabha polls to unitedly fight the BJP.Gandhi, while asking how the Left analysed the emerging situation said that he was in touch with leaders such as Lalu Prasad, Nitish Kumar as well as some other parties as part of its efforts for ensuring a larger unity against the saffron challenge.Raja is learnt to have conveyed to Rahul Gandhi his party central executive’s decision for unity of broader secular and democratic parties to face the surging BJP’s challenge.Later in the day, a CPI delegation conveyed to the CPM leadership about the former’s decision to pitch for unity of democratic, secular and Left parties to fight the ‘onslaught’ of the policies of BJP and NDA government and underlined the need for other Left Parties, including CPM to be part of such initiative.The meeting was held at the CPM headquarters. The CPI delegation comprised party general secretary Sudhakar Reddy, central secretariat members D Raja, Atul Anjan and Amarjit Kaur and the CPM side was represented by general secretary Sitaram Yechury and polit bureau members Prakash Karat, S Ramachandran Pillai and Hannan Mollah.“Today we have conveyed to the CPM leadership about our party executive’s decision about the need for a larger platform of secular, democratic and Left parties to fight the communal onslaught of the BJP and the divisive agenda of the Modi government. We have decided to meet again next week for further discussions during which CPM may respond to our view,” CPI chief Sudhakar Reddy told ET. Thursday’s meeting remained inconclusive as some of them had to rush to Parliament for participating in GST debate.