The amazing appearance on Monday of a missing Bihar schoolboy, whose assumed murder and the subsequent police indifference sparked off violent protests leading to police firing causing two people’s death last week, emboldened the state’s ruling JD(U) to slam the Opposition parties for their hyperactive protests.
Even as Bihar’s major Opposition parties organised a crippling daylong bandh across the state on Monday to protest against alleged police and administrative misconduct, Prashant Kumar Jha, a 17-year-old student from Madhubani, assumed to have been killed, appeared with his girlfriend Preeti Chaudhary, 16, at Mehrauli police station in Delhi. The duo’s safe appearance brought an unexpected anticlimax to the Opposition parties’ efforts to ride the wave of public anger directed at Bihar’s JD(U)-BJP government.
“All is fine if it all ends well,” said chief minister Nitish Kumar after learning from DGP Abhayanand about the young couple’s appearance. Mr Kumar, facing stiff criticism for the recent violent public protests, had abruptly cancelled his ongoing Adhikar yatra programmes on Sunday.
The lovelorn couple, who had left their homes in Madhubani on September 7, were busy shopping at Mehrauli when an elderly man spotted them and called the police. A team from Mehrauli police station soon reached, took them in custody and informed Bihar police, said the DGP, who also spoke to the couple over phone. The finding of a headless body on October 3 that Jha’s family had claimed to be his and the police disputing this identification had sparked off the protests and the two deaths from firing.
JD(U)’s Bihar chief V.N. Singh said the entire incident proved that the RJD, LJP and CPI(ML) were ready to “go to any extent to spread anarchy in Bihar”. JD(U) spokesman Neeraj Kumar said: “RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav, a charge-sheeted man who earlier defiled Bihar’s political culture, must apologise to the people for having acted on incomplete information with utter impatience”.