Back after visiting Odisha, Jharkhand and Maharashtra along with Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar as part of his “unite opposition campaign”, JD-U president Rajiv Ranjan alias Lalan Singh on Friday said the date for the meeting of all Opposition leaders in Patna would soon be finalised.
Talking to media persons amid Odisha CM Naveen Patnaik’s statement in Delhi a day earlier that there was no possibility of a third front as far as he was concerned, Singh said Nitish Kumar never said his meeting with his Odisha counterpart was part of his :unite Opposition initiative”.
Earlier this week, Patnaik had said in in Bhubaneswar, in the presence of Nitish Kumar, that their meeting was not political and that his government had agreed to give 1.5 acres of land free of cost for the construction of Bihar Bhawan in Puri.
Dismissing BJP’s charge that the Bihar CM was wasting government money on such trips, Singh said Nitish Kumar was going on political visits on the party’s expense, not on the government’s expense, and the response was positive. “He does not spend even a penny of the government when he visits places outside the state for political purposes. The problem is that the BJP is getting increasingly jittery the way the Opposition parties are responding to Nitish Kumar’s initiative,” he said.
The JD-U president said that the BJP magic would wane as soon as the results of the Karnataka polls start coming in, as the margin of its defeat would be much bigger than what the exit polls suggest. “BJP says all corrupt leaders were conniving for united opposition, but in Karnataka, it was corruption that became a big issue against it. It had to take recourse to Bajrang Bali to whip up communal passion, but even that did not work,” he said.
“The same will happen in Madhya Pradesh. BJP is only using federal agencies to frighten the opposition, but that also does not work anymore. The Supreme Court has also shown BJP the mirror by through its recent verdicts, which will go a long way in restoring democratic values and sanctity of institutions. In case of both Delhi and Maharashtra, BJP stands exposed,” he said.
Singh said BJP was never ready to speak on important issues confronting the masses or on allegations against its own ministers or government. “It deflects all issues by taking refuge in communal politics and undermining institutions, but that will not work anymore,” he said.
He also made light of former union minister RCP Singh’s induction into in BJP. “He has gone where he wanted to go. We always knew he was a BJP agent and was working to weaken the JD-U. He wanted to repeat Maharashtra in Bihar, but could not succeed. Now, all that has been established with his joining the BJP,” he said.
Singh, who was the JD-U president before Lalan Singh took over, joined BJP in the national capital on Thursday.
