Nitish cuts Lalu’s home link to House

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The crushing setback to the RJD in Bihar’s watershed Assembly polls has put wily party chief Lalu Prasad Yadav in a rather piquantly unenviable situation, no member of his family has managed to enter the Assembly for the first time in many years.

As the RJD-LJP alliance got thoroughly rejected in Bihar’s decisive verdict, a dejected Mr Yadav found his wife Rabri Devi’s defeat to the NDA in both the constituencies she contested as unbelievable as unpalatable. Ms Devi, a former Bihar CM for eight years, was Leader of the Opposition in the last Assembly, in which the RJD was the main Opposition party with 55 MLAs. The RJD won only 22 seats in the latest Assembly polls.
Sources in the party on Thursday said Mr Yadav is in a quandary as to who to put in the still prestigious post of Leader of Opposition in the Assembly in an embarrassing situation where the Opposition has been hugely weakened due to the meagre numbers they won. The NDA won 206 of the total 243 seats in Bihar’s Assembly, leaving 22 for the RJD and just three for the LJP. Sources said senior RJD leader and president of the party’s Bihar unit, Abdul Bari Siddiqui, could be chosen for the post.
Ms Devi’s double defeat has been as much a painful political loss as a personal setback for the erstwhile Bihar strongman who was seen to be brazenly promoting family politics in the RJD. Mr Yadav had made his semi-literate wife the Opposition leader in 2005 despite protests from senior party colleagues. He was then the railway minister at the Centre and wanted a “hot home link” to the Bihar Assembly dominated by the NDA after 15 years of RJD rule, said an RJD leader.
In 1997, when he had to quit as Bihar’s chief minister and go to jail for alleged involvement in the `1,000-crore fodder scam, Mr Yadav had defied senior colleagues to make Ms Devi Bihar’s CM.