After six months of his self-imposed silence on Bihar affairs and an equally long absence from his lost source of power, RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav appeared before his supporters in Patna in a new, improved avatar on Wednesday and held his audience spellbound by his familiar fire.
With his typical irreverent gusto evidently intact and perhaps boosted by the presence of a swarming crowd of sloganeering supporters, Mr Yadav exhorted RJD leaders and supporters to get ready for agitations to “expose the absolutely corrupt government of Nitish Kumar” before Bihar’s people. He mocked at RJD leaders who recently quit to join the JD(U) and vowed to undo the corrupt practices established during Mr Nitish Kumar’s regime “when the RJD returns to power”. “I will now visit Bihar’s villages and ask the poor people if they are happy in this regime. Then I will ask them to begin agitations so we could push this scam-hit government out. We will begin the agitations from Gandhi Maidan in Patna, and I will myself lead this rally,” said Mr Yadav. He said the RJD would organise a massive rally in Patna on October 11 to demand CBI investigation into the various alleged scams that surfaced during the JD(U)-BJP regime.
Attacking the state government on the huge sums of public money lying unaccounted for because detailed contingency (DC) bills were yet to be submitted to the CAG and the latest alleged scam of allotments of industrial land, Mr Yadav said the RJD would continue demanding a CBI probe into such irregularities.
“The DC bills yet to be submitted are worth `31,000. This is not Lalu saying but the CAG, whose report led to A. Raja landing in jail. The Nitish government has caused massive losses to the Bihar exchequer by wilfully not allotting BIADA land by tenders,” said Mr Yadav.
“The JD(U) has lured away leaders from Ram Vilas Paswan’s and our own party. But the quitting and joining of MLAs does not affect anyone’s weight. Our (RJD) support base is intact,” said Mr Yadav, though successive elections have shown the RJD’s dwindling base. The RJD chief said his meetings with Congress president Sonia Gandhi in Delhi earlier were not about his “rumoured desire” to get a berth in the Union Cabinet.