The BJP’s choice of Bihar as the launchpad for L.K. Advani’s anti-corruption rath yatra has revived the contest between chief minister Nitish Kumar and RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav to prove their secular credentials. The RJD hopes to exploit Advani’s yatra to regain its sagging support base among Bihar’s Muslims.
While Mr Yadav, apparently keen to restore his badly damaged halo of the “messiah of Muslims” in Bihar, raised the contrast between him and his arch rival Nitish Kumar in light of Mr Advani’s slated yatra and his previous one in the 1990s, senior RJD leaders threatened on Tuesday that their party workers would stop Mr Advani’s yatra in Bihar if it displays any communal overtones.
Mr Advani’s latest yatra has suddenly given RJD leaders a supposedly promising reason to cash in on Mr Yadav’s reputation as a fiercely pro-Muslim leader, which he had earned largely for stopping the BJP patriarch’s Ram Janmabhoomi national agitations in 1992 in Bihar. Mr Yadav, who was Bihar’s CM then, had further enhanced this image through political posturing on various issues concerning the Mulsims during the RJD’s 15-year rule in the state. It was the Muslims’ continual support of the RJD for 15 years that had helped Mr Yadav to win consecutive elections before 2005 and emerge as a stalwart both regionally and nationally.
But the secularism contest between Mr Yadav and Mr Kumar has only been hastened by Mr Advani’s yatra plans and the JD(U) leader’s support it has got after much speculation about the contrary. Acutely aware that the RJD’s shrinking Muslims’ support was the cause for its rout, Mr Yadav has taken several steps recently to appease the minorities. His latest move was to visit the families of five Muslim victims of the June 3 police firing in Araria earlier this month while Mr Kumar never visited them.
Mr Advani’s yatra has given a combative edge to Mr Yadav’s efforts to accentuate that he is a greater pro-Muslim leader than Mr Kumar.
In November 2007, Yadav had openly attacked Bihar’s then principal home secretary Afzal Amanullah, saying the latter was posted in his present top job by Kumar’s JD(U)-BJP government as a reward for defying his (Yadav’s) orders to arrest Advani advancing through Bihar in his yatra in 1992. The RJD alleged that Amanullah, then posted as deputy commissioner of Dhanbad district in united Bihar, had deliberately violated Yadav’s orders to arrest the “communal Advani”.