Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar's Janata Dal-United on Tuesday launched a frontal attack on ally Bharatiya Janata Party, asking it to rein in 'loudmouth leaders' whose 'arrogance' had cost it an old partner like the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra.
The party is singed over Sasaram BJP MP Chhedi Paswan's declamation that lust for power could drive Kumar, the de facto JD-U leader, to join hands with 'even Dawood Ibrahim', the most-wanted Mumbai underworld don and 1993 serial blasts mastermind.
"Does Chhedi Paswan remember Mehbooba Mufti at whom his party used to go hammer and tongs but lust for power drove it to share power with her in Jammu and Kashmir," said JD-U national secretary Rajiv Ranjan Prasad.
The People's Democratic Party-BJP alliance had formed the last government in Jammu and Kashmir before the abrogation of Article 370 which also saw the state being reorganised into two Union territories.
Prasad also reminded Paswan of former Maharashtra minister Eknath Khadse who was expelled from the then BJP government in the western state after his alleged links with Dawood got exposed.
Paswan, seen as a loose cannon, had jumped on the bandwagon of relentless attacks on the JD-U by Bihar BJP president Sanjay Jaiswal, and termed a 'mistake' backing Kumar for his current tenure and favoured a power-sharing formula which allowed the saffron party to have its own CM for half of the government's five-year-term.
The JD-U national secretary seethed at Jaiswal's 'inability to take any action' against leaders like Paswan but picking holes in things that the chief minister and his party did.
"Jaiswal keeps questioning the benefits of sharaab bandi (prohibition) which has transformed the villages of Bihar. His party should tell us the benefits, if any, of note bandi (demonetisation) which caused many people to die, waiting for their turn in endless queues outside banks and ATMs," said Prasad.
He also expressed dismay over Jaiswal's claim that Bihar was getting more central aid than states like Maharashtra and West Bengal.
"His understanding of economics seems pitiable. Bihar has suffered historically because of policies like freight equalization which did not allow it to reap benefits of the rich mineral reserves it had until these too were taken away with creation of Jharkhand," said Prasad.
"It is against this backdrop of a long history of injustice that our chief minister has been demanding special category status for Bihar," said the JD-U leader.
Prasad sought to remind the BJP that 'our ties are more than a decade old' but cautioned the saffron camp against pitfalls of ahankaar (arrogance) and badbolapan (bluster), citing the example of Maharashtra where the Shiv Sena has ended up in the rival camp, forming a government with Sharad Pawar's Nationalist Congress Party and the Congress.
