The opposition BJP in Bihar on Monday created a ruckus in the state assembly demanding the resignation of Deputy Chief Minister Tejashwi Yadav against whom the CBI has filed a charge sheet in land for jobs scam.
No sooner than the House assembled, on the inaugural day of the monsoon session, BJP chief whip Janak Ram rose in his seat and demanded the resignation of Yadav, who sat quietly in the treasury benches alongside his boss, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar.
Proceedings for the day were adjourned minutes later, after obituary references, but the opposition party made it clear that it would keep pressing the issue. “We did not press the matter today in view of the solemnity of the occasion. But during the rest of the session, we will force the government to come clean on corruption”, Leader of the Opposition Vijay Kumar Sinha told reporters outside the House.
“The chief minister seems to have struck a compromise with corruption. He will be held to account for his acts of commission and omission”, said the BJP leader, whose party was stripped of power a year ago when Kumar, the JD(U)’s supreme leader, quit the NDA and joined Mahagathbandhan.
Earlier, Kumar reached the assembly with his deputy and the latter’s elder brother Tej Pratap Yadav, a cabinet minister himself, in his car.
The gesture was apparently aimed at sending out the signal that all is well within the ‘Mahagathbandhan’ of which the RJD, founded and headed by the Yadav duo’s father Lalu Prasad, is the largest constituent. Kumar had reached the assembly from the adjacent Old Secretariat building where he planted a tree as part of a state-level drive ‘Van Mahotsav’ which seeks to improve the forest cover in Bihar.
Before getting seated in his car along with the two cabinet colleagues, Kumar had a brief chat with journalists with whom he shared his enthusiasm over improving forest cover in Bihar, claiming that it has increased substantially since he took over in 2005.
However, when he was asked about the BJP’s plans to corner the government during the session, Kumar replied with a smirk “Now leave that aside. You people seem to have been hijacked by one party”.
Notably, the land for jobs scam pertains to a period when Yadav’s father was the Railway Minister though he himself was a minor. In 2017, when Yadav was enjoying his first tenure as the Deputy CM, his name cropped up in the land for hotel scam and Kumar snapped ties with the RJD-Congress combine, irked over the controversy that had engulfed his government.
He formed a new government with the BJP which quickly came out with the offer of unconditional support but, following accusations that the saffron party was trying to “break” the JD(U), returned to the Mahagathbandhan vowing to defeat the NDA in the next year’s Lok Sabha polls. The CBI charge sheet last week triggered speculations in a section of the media about the future course of action by Kumar, who swears by “no compromise on corruption, crime and communalism”.
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