In poll-bound Bihar’s political race between free motorcycles of the future and free bicycles already running on village roads, the humbler two-wheeler keeps scoring more points and bringing for the leader behind it ample verbal ammunition to be used against his arch-rival.
With the success of his distribution of free bicycles to over nine lakh schoolgirls in Bihar in the past four years, chief minister Nitish Kumar has managed to make RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav’s campaign promise of distributing free motorcycles to school students look like empty words. Yadav, fighting perhaps the toughest electoral battle in his political career with the upcoming Assembly polls, is increasingly finding his own campaign speeches boomeranging upon him.
The very day Mr Yadav mocked at Mr Kumar’s claims of all-round development in Bihar and promised at a campaign rally that he would provide free motorcycles to the state’s school students if the RJD-LJP came to power, a delighted Mr Kumar said: “When the bike-riding students would ask for money to buy fuel, Yadav will ask them to sell their bikes to buy fuel”.
Mr Yadav’s swift retort that the RJD-LJP government would also provide fuel to the school students did not help because Mr Kumar went on using Mr Yadav’s motorcycle promise in each of the JD(U)-BJP’s campaign rallies and reminded people that schoolchildren cannot ride motorcycles as it is illegal for people under 18.
“The promise for free motorcycles is quintessentially Lalu Yadav, all airs and no substance, just like his 15-year rule in Bihar and the truth behind his much-hyped railway successes,” Mr Kumar said in his rallies. The JD(U)-BJP government has spent close to `180 crores under the Mukhyamantri Balika Cycle Yojna, under which a schoolgirl, upon passing her eighth class, gets a cheque of `2,000 to buy a bicycle so that she can go to school every day. In a state struggling with very low female literacy and high incidence of violence against women, the free bicycles have been praised as a major driving factor for credible social change in the making.
Mr Yadav also keeps facing derision from Kumar for singing the film song Mere pairon mein ghungru bandhale, toh phir meri chal dekh le (Tie the dancing-bells around my feet and watch me dance) at an RJD campaign rally. “Politics is serious business and he (Yadav) cannot make fun of it any longer,” said Mr Kumar at a rally in Kishenganj on Sunday.