RJD President Lalu Prasad today hit back at Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his “no shame” comment against grand secular alliance leaders in the wake of a sting video of a JD(U) minister allegedly accepting bribe and asked would he(PM) resign if BJP failed to win Bihar polls.
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Maoists called for a boycott of the election but the message was ignored except in a few polling booths in Nawada, Jamui and Banka districts. Votes will be counted on November 8.
The BJP has improved in nearly every Bihar election since the party’s inception in 1980, culminating with 37 per cent of seats in the 2010 vote.
He has also promised billions of dollars for development in the state, where two-thirds of people have no access to electricity.
Development is a key issue with voters like Dani Hassan, who runs a mobile fix shop in the state capital Patna. Shah is not just the executioner of the Prime Minister’s political strategies but is also the eyes and ears of the “Saheb”, the expression he uses for Modi. “Look at the job situation, there are so many unemployed”.
Many of its 104 million people still vote along caste lines.
“Both sides are talking about development”. I see no dent in the prime minister’s image.
The SP president said that the BJP and the SP had many things in common and recalled the time when the erstwhile Jan Sangh (now BJP) and the Samajwadis had joined hands to oust the Congress.
Opinion polls predict a tight race. Analysts say a victory for Modi’s party would signal approval of its attempts to push its brand of Hindu right-wing politics.
“The Bihar election will be the biggest electoral test for the Mr Modi-led BJP government thus far”, write Milan Vaishnav and Saksham Khosla of Carnegie Endowment’s South Asia Program in a paper on the elections. But the party was unexpectedly trounced in local elections held in Delhi in February this year.
Hundreds of thousands of people have lined up at polling stations in the east Indian state of Bihar for elections that are being seen as a referendum measuring Narendra Modi’s popularity. But the issue turned volatile when a Muslim man was mobbed to death on the outskirts of Delhi two weeks ago on rumors that he had eaten beef.
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However, everyone agrees that the main battle will be between Modi and Nitish Kumar, who once sailed in the same boat but are now bitter foes. “If that happens then definitely hardliners within the BJP would try and pursue this as a policy in the coming months, coming years”.
