Poll-bound Bihar on Saturday bore witness to a hardening of stance by the INDIA bloc on the issue of the contentious Waqf (Amendment) Act, with chief ministerial candidate Tejashwi Yadav and key ally Dipankar Bhattacharya of CPI(ML) Liberation vowing to thwart implementation of the law upon coming to power.
A day after RJD MLC Abdul Qari Saheb’s threat of tearing the Waqf Act to shreds had triggered a controversy, Yadav, son and heir apparent of party supremo Lalu Prasad, told rallies in Seemanchal region that upon forming the next government, the contentious law will be “consigned to the dustbin”.
One of the districts covered by Yadav, in the Muslim-majority north-eastern part of Bihar, was Katihar, where he received a thumbs up from local Congress MP and former Union minister Tariq Anwar.
After a meeting with party leaders to oversee preparations for the assembly polls, Anwar told reporters, “We fully back Tejashwi on the stand he has taken on Waqf. The Congress has always been opposed to the bill. So have other prominent leaders opposed to the BJP, like West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee."
Shortly after Yadav’s declamations, Bhattacharya held a press conference in the state capital Patna to release his party’s manifesto titled “Parivartan Sankalp Patra”.
The Left leader, who has not ruled out the possibility of joining the government if the INDIA bloc comes to power, told reporters on the occasion that “we will thwart the implementation of the Waqf (Amendment) Act in Bihar. In fact, we will not allow the implementation of all such laws brought in by the Centre, in the recent past, which have been violative of the federal structure enshrined in the Constitution”.
Bhattacharya also termed as “farcical” the ban on sale and consumption of liquor imposed by the Nitish Kumar government in April, 2016, and said “there will be a critical review of the prohibition law if we form the new government”.
A populist move which is believed to have endeared the longest-serving CM to the state’s women voters, the prohibition law has constantly been under scanner in Bihar, where it has been implemented shoddily, as evident from frequent hooch deaths and seizure of liquor in massive quantities on a regular scale.
Jan Suraaj Party founder Prashant Kishor, the new kid on the bloc in Bihar’s politics, has gone as far as declaring that if his one-year-old party won the polls, “this bogus (farji) prohibition law will be scrapped on the day we form the government and revenue thus earned will be put to use for the state’s development”.
Meanwhile, the Congress, which seems to be lagging behind in its campaign, disclosed that canvassing would pick up soon after the Chhath festival, with the arrival of Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi.
Congress general secretary (organisation) K C Venugopal, who was among a galaxy of top leaders camping in the state, to fine tune the party’s strategy as also to quell the dissent that had come to fore after distribution of tickets, said Gandhi was likely to tour the state “on October 29 and 30” and programmes of other heavyweights, including Priyanka Vadra and national president Mallikarjun Kharge were also on the cards.
The BJP, which has already pulled out its heavy artillery, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah and national president Jagat Prakash Nadda’s rallies held earlier this week, is gearing up for another round of blitzkrieg.
Modi is scheduled to hold rallies in Muzaffarpur and Chhapra on October 30, and again on November 2 at Bhojpur and Nawada, followed by a roadshow in the state capital.
Union minister Dharmendra Pradhan, who has been named the BJP’s in-charge for the ongoing elections, was seen walking down the streets of the city, along with party colleagues, to get an idea of the preparations to be made for the roadshow by Modi, arguably the biggest crowd-puller in the NDA camp.
Meanwhile, former bete noires Nitish Kumar and Chirag Paswan, who head JD(U) and Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas) respectively, put up a show of solidarity when the former visited the latter’s house to partake “kharna prasad” prepared on the eve of Chhath.
Talking to journalists later, Paswan, now a union minister, who had a few years ago charged the chief minister with having humiliated his late father Ram Vilas Paswan, fulminated against “false narratives of the opposition”, which he blamed for reports in a section of the media that Kumar had been upset with the seat-sharing deal in the NDA.
Kumar was said to have been upset over his party getting, for the first time in a state assembly poll, the same number of seats as the BJP, and some of JD(U) strongholds going to the party of Paswan. The JD(U) had felt that Paswan's revolt in 2020 had caused the party's tally to crash in the last assembly polls.
Once a close friend of Tejashwi Yadav, the Hajipur MP charged the RJD leader with “misleading” the people on the Waqf issue.
Paswan reminded Tejashwi that his father, upon conviction in a fodder scam case, got disqualified “because Rahul Gandhi tore up a copy of the ordinance”, which, it was then believed, had been brought by the Manmohan Singh government to protect Prasad.
