The death of nine people in Patna on Friday allegedly after consuming hooch prompted Bihar’s Oppo-sition parties on Saturday to call for a CBI probe into all the five recent incidents that have caused the loss of 70 lives in less than two months.
RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav and several senior RJD leaders visited the kin of the victims in Patna’s Mehndiganj and Khajekalan area and assured them of efforts to take up their grievances against rampant manufacturing and sale of illicit liquor.
Mr Yadav, who returned to Patna earlier in the day after completing the ninth phase of his “Parivartan yatra,” accused the government of extreme indifference to the rising deaths caused by hooch across Bihar.
Rejecting the Patna district administration’s claim that the ten deaths were caused by extreme cold or disease and not by consumption of spurious liquor, the leader of Opposition in the Assembly, Abdul Bari Siddiqui of the RJD, said: “This government has earlier pointed at political conspiracy behind the hooch-led deaths in other places. They now blame the cold to divert attention from the illicit liquor mafia’s nefarious network. A CBI probe will bring out the truth”.
Hundreds of residents in Khajekalan area in the capital city blocked a main road in the area in protest against the loose monitoring of manufacturing and sale of liquor.
They also accused government officials of asking relatives of the dead people not to mention liquor as the cause of the deaths. Eight of the nine bodies were cremated without an autopsy, they said.
Patna district magistrate Sanjay Kumar Singh, however, denied the charge and said some relatives were unwilling to allow autopsy.
Ruling JD(U) spokesman Rajiv Ranjan said the samples of liquor collected by the police did not turn out to be spurious and that a crackdown on illicit liquor dens was going on by the excise commissioner and the police. Ten people were arrested on Saturday in connection with the deaths.