Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar on Friday said Hindustani Awam Morcha (Secular) founder and former CM Jitan Ram Manjhi was spying for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) so he asked him to either merge his party with the Janata Dal (United) or leave the ruling alliance, the mahagathbandhan, in the state.
Kumar broke his silence on the matter three days after Manjhi’s son and HAM-S president Santosh Kumar Suman quit his cabinet.
“I had asked Manjhi to either merge his party with us or leave the alliance. Instead, his son and HAM(S) president preferred to quit the state cabinet. It is good he is no longer with our alliance. It is an open secret that Manjhi was meeting BJP leaders. He was keen on attending the June 23 meeting. Had he stayed with us and attended the meeting, he would have passed all information to the BJP,” Kumar told reporters after the swearing-in of JD(U) MLA Ratnesh Sada as a minister in place of Suman.
The chief minister was referring to the meeting of top Congress leaders and regional satraps, including a few chief ministers, scheduled in Patna on June 23, in which they are expected to discuss strategy to unitedly challenge the BJP in of the 2024 parliamentary polls.
Manjhi said it was good that Kumar had himself snapped ties with his party, adding that he would decided on his next course of action on June 19 at the party meeting in Patna.
“I had vowed to always remain with CM Kumar. Now, when he has himself pressed the exit button for me, I feel liberated. When Kumar was with the BJP-led NDA as a CM, everything was fine. Now, suddenly he has developed an allergy for BJP,” Manjhi said on phone from Gaya.
Suman, in a press interaction, dismissed Kumar’s allegation that his party was hobnobbing with BJP. “We could never have compromised with our party’s identity by merging it with JD(U). They do not want smaller parties to grow for the fear of their own existence,” he said.
HAM(S) currently has four MLAs and its exit will not impact from the ruling alliance which has a comfortable majority in the in the 243-member Bihar assembly.
Manjhi said his party has identified 15 seats in Magadh and Kosi regions where it could field candidates in the next Lok Sabha polls.
This isn’t the first time that Nitish Kumar and Jitan Manjhi have fallen out.
In May 2014, Nitish Kumar, owning responsibility for his party JD(U)’s poor performance in the Lok Sabha polls, had quit the chief minister’s post and handpicked Manjhi as his successor.
However, in February the next year, Manjhi was ousted as CM and Kumar returned to the helm following an intra-party coup.
“It is me who had made Manjhi the CM. But everybody knows what happened later,” CM Kumar said today.
Meanwhile, state BJP spokesperson Arvind Singh said the accusations levelled against Manjhi by the CM was unbecoming of a leader of the stature of Kumar.
