New Delhi: Rebel Bharatiya Janata Party leader Lal Muni Chaubey, a four-time Lok Sabha MP who has been denied a ticket this time, filed his nomination on Wednesday as an Independent from the Buxar seat in Bihar despite Narendra Modi trying to persuade him from not doing so.
Chaubey is a prominent Brahmin face of the BJP and with him in the fray things can really get tough for the party not only in Buxar but in many seats of Bihar and even in eastern Uttar Pradesh. He has already declared his intention to campaign against the BJP.
Sources close to him say that Modi spoke to him on phone for several minutes on Tuesday night but Chaubey curtly told the BJP prime ministerial candidate that the party had ignored senior leaders and humiliated him by fielding Bhagalpur MLA Ashwini Kumar Chaubey from Buxar.
Earlier on Tuesday senior Bihar BJP leader Sushil Kumar Modi and Ashwini Kumar Chaubey, too, failed to mollify him.
Lal Muni Chaubey even called party President Rajnath Singh "a leader of slaves" who had sidelined genuine supporters. He said that he had decided to contest as an Independent against Ashwini Kumar Chaubey.
"BJP has become a party of slaves and Rajnath Singh is a leader of slaves. I belong to Buxar as well as Varanasi. I will ensure BJP loses in the poorvanchal belt of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh including Varanasi," Lal Muni Chaubey said. BJP prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi is contesting from Varanasi apart from Vadodara in Gujarat.
Echoing his colleague from Rajasthan Jaswant Singh's views, he claimed that the voters of Buxar would defeat the "fake BJP candidate". He said that Ashwini Kumar Chaubey is an outsider who wanted to contest from Bhagalpur but the party placated him by accommodating him from Buxar.
Denying reports that BJP leadership has offered him the post of governor after the party forms the government at the Center, Chaubey said he was not interested in any post and wanted to strengthen the party which had been admitting even those people in large numbers who had been its virulent critic just a few days back.
He alleged that senior leaders like Lal Krishna Advani and Jaswant Singh had been humiliated by the party leadership. Pointing that the name of former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Advani's names are missing from the campaign slogans, he added that the latter has been given the Gandhinagar seat to ensure his defeat so that there is no one who can challenge the top leaders.
Chaubey had won from Buxar in 1996, 98, 99 and 2004. He narrowly lost to Rashtriya Janata Dal's Sadanand Singh in the 2009 elections by just over 2000 votes.
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