After the ruling Janata Dal(United) faced rout in the last lok Sabha polls, the party seemingly has come into serious revamp mode with the former Chief Minister Nitish Kumar calling a meeting of party leaders and candidates who lost the poll, on Monday, to discuss what went wrong and how. The party is also expected to mull over the strategies for the upcoming State Assembly polls scheduled for October-November next year.
“The meeting has been called to do a post-mortem of last lok Sabha results for the party … what went wrong and what should be done to avoid such humiliating defeat,” said a State JD(U) leader, adding it will also be discussed how party’s performance would be improved in the next Assembly polls.Ever since the JD(U) faced a humiliating defeat in the last parliamentary polls and Kumar resigned from his post of State CM, it was expected that the party would soon be in a revamp mode to gear itself for the upcoming Assembly elections. The JD(U) could only manage to win two seats out of the total 40 in the 2014 general polls.
“Yes, the party has called a meeting of its leaders on Monday to strengthen itself after plugging the loopholes which caused unexpected result in the last lS polls,” said State party chief Basistha Narayan Singh. He also said that in days to come the party will be in a new avatar with necessary and important changes in its rank and file.
Of late, party president Sharad Yadav had called a meeting of party office bearers in New Delhi to discuss about the same and reportedly sought the need to revamp the party. Two of the party leaders and Minister in the Manjhi Cabinet Shyam Rajak and Bheem Singh had gone to participate in the meeting.
Meanwhile, in another exercise apparently to stall the internal bickering among the party leaders and MlAs, the Manjhi Government is likely to expand its Cabinet soon after the arrival of State Governor DY Patil in the second week of the month.Sources said that about 15 new members are likely to be included in the Manjhi Government as the total strength of the Cabinet to the permissible limit is 38. At present there are 17 Ministers.
Ever since the BJP parted ways with the ruling party alliance, JD(U) on June 16 last year, altogether 18 Cabinet berths had fallen vacant and the former CM had kept all these Ministries with him for nearly a year. There has been occasional murmuring over the vacant Cabinet berths and the likely expansion of the but Nitish preferred to keep this exercise aside apparently to stall more dissension in the party.
Now, with Jitan Ram Manjhi at the helm of affairs, the expansion of Cabinet appeared to be in the offing. If sources are to be believed names of the party MlAs to be included in the Ministry have already been decided and discussed by Nitish. “All castes and constituencies will be given representation in the likely expansion of the Cabinet,” said a party source.
However, the names of party leaders doing rounds in the power corridor to be included in the Cabinet are former State party chief Rajiv Ranjan Singh alias lallan Singh, lallan Saraf who is a close friend of Nitish, Samarat Chaudhury, Vijay Kumar Mishra, Ram Vachan Rai, Ram lakhan Ram Raman and Sumit Kumar. Sumit Kumar is the son of Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh, who earlier was believed to be stirring a rebel in the party for his own political ambitions, though, he has had been denying all these as political rumors.