The reason was that there were many important questions that would be answered by its result. With a population of over a 100 million and an electorate of over 66 million, it has a legislative assembly strength of 248.
Advertisement
On the possibility of Mr. Prasad’s daughter Misa or either of his sons assuming the post of Deputy Chief Minister in the new Nitish Kumar government, Mr. Sinha said, “I don’t think it will happen”.
His DNA barb is an apparent reference to Modi’s DNA dig at Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar who had made it a major campaign issue in the Bihar assembly election. But the party lost in many seats where the PM addressed election rallies. The Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies had to settle for a mere 58 seats. Another BJP ally Upendra Kushvaha, hailing from Kushvaha/Koeri caste, is yet to emerge as the supreme leader of his caste and could not match the status that Lalu, Nitish Kumar and Ramvilas Paswan enjoy in their respective castes.
But no invitation has been sent to any other BJP leader, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi and party president Amit Shah. They tried to embarrass Advani when they said that the BJP, under Atal Bihari Vajpayee and L.K. Advani, had set a “healthy” practice of collective responsibility for both victory and defeat.
“Hinduism” itself is a complex melange of beliefs, practices and rituals with no strict internal unity.
Summary: “People of Bihar voted for Nitish in 2005 and 2010 but BJP thought it got support because of its own support base”.
He accused the BJP leadership of having “vested interests” while stubbornly refusing to learn any lesson from the thumping loss in the Bihar Assembly elections.
A defeat as emphatic as Bihar would tie any political party in knots.
BJP MP Shatrughan Sinha, who has been repeatedly attacking his party’s leadership for sidelining him during the recent Bihar elections, has now dared it to act against him and RK Singh, his colleague from Bihar. Coming from an internal source, obviously much venerated too, the charge that the hold of the Modi-Shah duo on the party has “destroyed” the basic character of the BJP can be no longer dismissed lightly.
Six, in a state which is deeply riven by caste and community identities, BJP’s experiment to counter it with development agenda has failed.
However, one can not forget that the victory of BJP and Narendra Modi in the Lok Sabha elections was largely due to bad performance of UPA government, policy paralysis and a slew of scams. Was this a class struggle in the form of caste struggle?
Another point which people tend to forget is that Congress is firmly behind Nitish, so it’s actually 98 (JDU+INC) versus 80 for RJD.
Polarisation is not a substitute for development politics.
“Like the non-Congress politics practised in the country earlier, the non-BJP politics has begun from Bihar”. Many from Bihar viewed “Hindutva” only as a basically anti-Muslim doctrine.
Supporters of the odd reunion can counter this alarmist tendency with one stroke: What if the cynics are misreading Lalu Prasad or maligning him without fresh empirical evidence?
Advertisement
This approach is startlingly contemporary and is part of the United Nations terminology on the Millennium Development Goals, which advocates the dignity of the human person at the centre of development.
