October 29th 2023.
JD President Rajiv Ranjan Singh 'Lalan' defended his party's decision to field candidates in the Madhya Pradesh polls, where their ally Congress is facing off with the BJP. Lalan, a key aide of Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, was responding to queries from journalists about the five candidates his party had put forward for the 230-strong assembly.
"Would we not make efforts to expand the base of our organisation?" said Lalan. "The INDIA coalition has been set up to defeat the BJP in the Lok Sabha polls, but in state assemblies, different sets of dynamics are involved." He noted that both Congress and CPI fight each other in Kerala, and the same was true for Mamata Banerjee and the Left in West Bengal.
Lalan also alleged that Prime Minister Narendra Modi's decision to appoint government officials as "rath prabharis" to promote the Centre's agenda was a result of his lack of trust in the BJP's cadre.
"The PM knows that his party workers have been feeling stifled because of the lack of intra-party democracy," he said. "They have also been facing the heat of growing public dissatisfaction with the government which has miserably failed to deliver on its promises like bringing back black money and creating two crore jobs every year."
"Even on the issue of corruption, the Modi government has lost its credibility," Lalan continued. "The CAG has flagged glaring irregularities in the Centre's flagship scheme Ayushman Bharat Yojana. But the government does not have the courage to get these investigated."
He further added that Agniveer soldiers were not entitled to benefits extended to martyrs even if they lost their lives while discharging their duties.
Lalan then mocked Home Minister Amit Shah's bold predictions of a BJP victory in the upcoming assembly polls.
"Amit Shah seems very fond of bombastic predictions," he said. "But he seems to have learnt his astrology from a charlatan. We saw his rhetoric in the assembly polls of Bihar in 2015 when he was forecasting the exact time when Nitish Kumar will be tendering resignation after the Mahagathbandhan's defeat. But it was the BJP which ended up being trounced."
The JD chief reminded people of his party's shifting alliances, which had seen them move from the NDA to the Mahagathbandhan and back again. He concluded by saying that Modi's decision to appoint bureaucrats to promote his agenda was a testament to his lack of faith in the BJP's cadre.
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