The Congress on Thursday extended an olive branch to its ‘wannabe ally’ and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar in the form of Rs12,000 crore package under the Backward Regions Grant Fund (BRGF). The allocation for the next four years of the five year plan is Rs8,000 crore less than what Nitish had sought from the Congress-led Government at the Centre.
While approving Rs12,000 crore to Bihar, the KBK region of Odisha, and Bundelkhand region of UP-MP have also been sanctioned Rs1250 crore and Rs4400 crore respectively.
This decision of Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs came on a day senior Bihar BJP leaders apprised the party high command about current political situation there in the backdrop of Kumar’s Sunday speech attacking Narendra Modi.
Apprehensive about Kumar’s future plans, the BJP chose to attack the Congress for ‘betraying’ Bihar with reduced BRGF allocation. “Congress and UPA are doing injustice to Bihar. They are betraying Bihar. Against the demand of Rs20,000 crore, Congress has given only Rs12,000 crore in five years and taken away Rs8,000 crore from the State,” BJP spokesman Syed Shahnawaz Hussain said after the Bihar BJP’s core group meet with Central leaders here.
In an over two hours long meeting with 10 senior Bihar leaders, BJP president Rajnath Singh and senior leader Arun Jaitley took feedback on possibilities of Kumar walking out of the alliance and necessary action needed thereafter.
After the one-to-one interaction with all of them, Singh told the Bihar leaders that BJP should not take the blame of breaking the alliance and efforts should be made to keep it intact.
Singh told party leaders to remain united in this ‘time of crisis’ and cautioned them against speaking out of turn in the media on issue of PM-candidate and BJP-JD(U) relationship. Bihar leaders have been asked to have a Delhi-like Media strategy in place where key leaders speak to each other on important issues and authorise a senior spokesman to brief the media on it.
The party leadership, however, told Bihar leaders not to take lying down the JD(U) barbs against Modi and respond to all such remarks with full force. Jaitley reportedly admitted in the meeting that Bihar situation was ‘fluid’ and party should be ready for any eventuality. Given its experience in Odisha, where Biju Janata Dal of Naveen Patnaik walked out of the NDA on the eve of the 2009 lok Sabha election, the BJP does not want to caught off guard in Bihar.
leaders have been advised to hold panchayat level conferences of workers and expedite the process of formation of booth committees.
Sources say the BJP top brass asked the party workers to prepare assessment reports of all lok Sabha constituencies and prepare itself for the next polls, even if the party has to go alone in view of the growing discontent between the two alliance partners. Sources say many leaders from Bihar are willing to sacrifice JD-U’s alliance for Narendra Modi as PM candidate.
“There is a groundswell of support in favour of Narendra Modi. How can we ignore this factIJ Nitish Kumar has his own compulsion, but the decision to elect a PM-candidate rests with us. We can not be dictated by our partners,” a Bihar BJP leader who attended the meeting said.