Keen on bringing the Forbesganj police firing on poor Muslims to the national spotlight, LJP chief Ram Vilas Paswan plans to hold a demonstration at Jantar Mantar in Delhi on July 5. He will also submit a memorandum to President Pratibha Patil on the brutal police crackdown the same day.
Mr Paswan, who earlier met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh over the June 3 police firing that killed four Muslims and later urged Rahul Gandhi to come to meet the family members of the dead, questioned Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar’s secular credentials and asked him to resign for his “failures in protecting the lives of the minorities and the poor”, whose children are currently dying by the dozens of suspected encephalitis mostly in Muzaffarpur.
The Jantar Mantar demonstration move, which Mr Paswan announced at a press conference on Sunday, will serve to further corner Mr Kumar on the politically-sensitive issue of communalism under the JD(U)-BJP government he heads in Bihar.
The move is seen as an ambitious extension of the current upsurge of Opposition attacks on Mr Kumar over the police firing, which was described by National Minorities Commission chairman Wajahat Habibullah as totally unjustified. Like the Congress and the RJD, the LJP has already staged demonstrations in Patna demanding a CBI probe into the incident.
“The chief minister’s insensitive attitude towards the victims of the police firing at Forbesganj and encephalitis in Muzaffarpur are exposed now.
He has chosen not to visit Forbesganj and Muzaffarpur,” said Mr Paswan. “People belonging to the minority community in Forbesganj are now under an atmosphere of terror due to intimidation by local officials,” he added.
An unusually vocal Paswan then went on to wonder if Bihar’s NDA government was “trying to replicate the Gujarat model” in the state’s northern border districts by “terrorising” the minority people ahead of the 2014 Lok Sabhha polls. “The police firing at Forbesganj seems to be a deliberate exercise to keep the Muslims on their toes,” said the LJP chief and Rajya Sabha member.
Paswan also slammed Kumar’s government for failure to spend MNREGS funds and still claiming that Bihari migrant workers were returning to the state.