In an emotional speech to a large, applauding Bihar crowd on Sunday, Gujarat chief minister and BJP icon Narendra Modi tried hard to melt the boycott imposed on him in Bihar by the ruling NDA ally JD(U) for some years and fiercely attacked Congress chief Sonia Gandhi, blaming her for the UPA government’s ills.
Visiting Bihar for the first time after the JD(U)-BJP government took over in 2005, a charismatic Mr Modi presented a nationalist and development-oriented picture of himself, glossing over the taint of the 2002 Gujarat communal riots, at the BJP’s Bihar Swabhiman Rally in Patna at the end of the party’s two-day national executive meeting. The crowd, having come from across Bihar and numbering about 40,000, greeted with applause almost every sentence in his half-hour speech.
Mr Modi’s speech was keenly awaited in Bihar’s political circles after the unexpected strains caused between the BJP and the ostentatiously secular JD(U) following objections by Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar of the JD(U) to full-page advertisements in some Bihar newspapers on Saturday that showed both Mr Modi and Mr Kumar together with their hands joined and raised high. Mr Kumar, after threatening legal action for the advertisements and cancelling a scheduled dinner for the BJP leaders, had the police visit the advertisement agency’s office in Patna on Saturday night to enquire of their origin.
The agency, Expressions, said they were issued by Vinod Paliwal, a Surat-based industrialist and had nothing to do with the BJP.
But Mr Modi, accompanied by top leaders of the BJP, including chief ministers from several BJP-ruled states, did not mention Mr Kumar or the continuing strains between the BJP and the JD(U) due to his image even as he showered praise on Bihar’s JD(U)-BJP government and took the name of Bihar deputy chief minister and BJP leader Sushil Kumar Modi.
Mr Modi juxtaposed the past and present political exchanges and similarities between Gujarat and Bihar, glowingly speaking of Mahatma Gandhi’s beginning of the India’s freedom movement from Bihar.