With the Jharkhand Vigilance Bureau having lodged FIRs against four MLAs from three leading parties for allegedly seeking bribes for casting votes in favour of a candidate in the Rajya Sabha polls, the issue of long-suspected “sale of RS seats” in the state is in the spotlight.

Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief and Union agriculture minister Sharad Pawar on Friday unveiled his party’s ambitions for Bihar’s imminent Assembly polls by attacking the state’s JD(U)-BJP government and promising good governance bereft of caste divisions and crime.

With the shadow of drought covering large parts of Bihar and Jharkhand due to scanty rainfall, their respective state governments have identified the districts suffering the most and started planning emergency steps to minimise crop loss and mitigate the farmers’ woes.

Just a month after Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar had a narrow escape while flying in a helicopter with its doors open, JD(U) national president Sharad Yadav on Thursday had a close shave when his helicopter developed severe mid-air vibrations that forced an emergency landing on a field near Patna.

Targeting Bihar’s Muslim voters at a time when all other parties are wooing the community ahead of the Assembly polls, the ruling BJP plans to hold a state-level convention of its Muslim workers in Patna.

Leaders of Bihar’s two ruling parties — the JD(U) and the BJP — are currently worried about the growing number of unseemly clashes witnessed at the meetings of their party workers across the state as they indicate that all is not well in the two parties’ affairs at the grassroots level just before the Assembly polls.

A BJP worker in Bihar was on Monday punished for asking a top leader of the party a few questions about the execution of development schemes that the leader found too uncomfortable. The perturbed leader, Bihar deputy chief minister Sushil Kumar Modi, ordered the party worker to be arrested.

The Nitish Kumar government’s eagerness to furnish the bills for thousands of crores of rupees spent in welfare projects over six years to the accountant-general has spread discontent among the state’

Buoyed by senior JD(U) leader and former vice-chairman of Bihar Legislative Council, Virendra Chaudhary, joining the RJD after criticising the ruling party, RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav on Saturday heightened his attacks on chief minister Nitish Kumar and described his government as a “regime of frauds and scams”.

Despite growing criticism and damaging comparisons made with the ills generally associated with the Opposition RJD, Bihar’s ruling JD(U) carries on its fascination with bar girls and their song-and-dance shows as a ploy to gather crowds.