Indicating that his survival instincts may still be intact, RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav on Sunday said he must not be considered to have grown old. No longer the flamboyant politician he used to be, Mr Yadav promised to keep working for Bihar’s poor and ensure that communal forces do not deepen their roots in the state.
Mr Yadav cautioned against writing off his party, claiming its alliance with LJP still enjoys support of a large chunk of electorate, despite drubbing in the Bihar Assembly polls.
“It will be wrong and distorting to say that the RJD-LJP alliance got swept away following the landslide victory the NDA pulled off,” Mr Yadav told reporters at his residence.
Badly mauled by the crushing defeat in the Assembly polls, a mellowing Mr Yadav set about resuming his politics in Bihar with the remnants of the mighty RJD of the 1990s and tried to breathe hope into the party’s newly-elected 22 MLAs. Mr Yadav appointed senior RJD leader and his loyal friend Abdul Bari Siddiqui as leader of the party’s MLAs in place of his wife and former Bihar chief minister Rabri Devi, who lost the polls in two constituencies where she contested. “Let these people not understand that I have grown old. I am still young and I will keep working for Bihar’s poor. I will not allow the communal forces to deepen their roots in Bihar’s soil,” said Mr Yadav at this meeting attended, apart from the MLAs, by the party MPs, former MPs and several senior leaders.
The RJD, which ruled in Bihar for 15 years since 1990 and was the main Opposition party in the last Assembly with 54 MLAs, suffered its biggest electoral setback as Bihar voted the NDA to power by a landslide.
Mr Yadav said Nitish Kumar’s return to power with a three-fourth majority was more due to his social engineering than the development projects undertaken by his government. Rabri Devi, who wore a sad smile when Siddiqui reluctantly bent his head to wear a garland offered by Mr Yadav, later said: “There is no defeat in politics. The people have asked us to be in the Opposition and we will do that well.”