Samajwadi Party seems to be a divided house over the reinstatement of Nitish Kumar as the Chief Minister of Bihar in alliance with the BJP.
While on one hand, senior SP leader Shivpal Singh Yadav congratulated Nitish, on the other another leader Azam Khan called him `selfish’. The reaction of the leaders came after Nitish Kumar won the vote of confidence in Bihar Assembly on Friday.
Interestingly, there is no reaction from Samajwadi Party patron Mulayam Singh Yadav over this development while SP national president Akhilesh Yadav reacted through a tweet saying “.. na na karte puar tumhi se kar baithe”.
Shivpal Singh Yadav, presently on a two-day tour to Azamgarh - the Parliamentary constituency of Mulayam Singh Yadav, congratulated Nitish Kumar for becoming Chief Minister and winning the vote of confidence.
“The decision he (Nitish Kumar) took is a historic one. It takes lot of courage to take such decisions,” Yadav said without elaborating further.
While around 400 kms north-west from Azamgarh, another senior SP leader Azam Khan said in Rampur that Nitish Kumar was `selfish’ and he sacrificed the principle of secularism for petty political gains.
“Nitish has made so much of tyag (sacrifice) that now Nitish Kumar should be called as Nitish Tyagi,” he told reporters in Rampur.
When asked about corruption charges levelled against Tejashwi Yadav, Khan said that anyone could level corruption charges against any political leader. “But the law says that until charges of corruption were proved, no one should be held guilty,” he explained.
“The CBI is being mis-used by the Central government. The Supreme Court has even called this federal investigating agency as a ‘caged parrot’. This ‘parrot’ is doing what it has been asked to do,” Khan said.