Driving Naari Programme launched in Chandigarh
Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, who left the ‘Mahagathbandhan’ on Sunday to rejoin the NDA, has taken a swipe at the INDIA bloc saying that the alliance of the non-BJP parties could not even take “one decision”.
He also stated that he was against the bloc getting named as INDIA. The Bihar CM said, “I was urging them to choose another name for the alliance. But they had already finalised it. I was trying so hard.
They did not do even one thing. Till today they haven’t decided which party will contest how many seats. This is why I left them and came back to who I was with initially. I will keep working for the people of Bihar.”
With just months away from the general elections, the INDIA bloc has failed to sort of differences between parties on seat-sharing issue. As a result, Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has announced that her party TMC has decided to go solo in the Lok Sabha polls and the AAP is also not keen on having alliance with the grand old party in Punjab.
On asking Rahul Gandhi taking credit for the caste census in Bihar, Nitish said, “… Has he forgotten when the caste census happened? I conducted it in the presence of 9 parties. In 2019-2020, I would talk about conducting caste census everywhere, from assembly to public meetings… He is taking fake credit, what can I do? Let it be.”
Nitish had played a key role in the formation of the INDIA bloc but decided to come out of the alliance days ago. He also ended the RJD-Congress alliance and returned to his old ally BJP ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
At a rally in Bihar’s Purnea on Tuesday, Rahul Gandhi said that the INDIA bloc does not need him. “He takes a U-turn the moment there is a bit of pressure on him,” the Congress leader said, adding that Kumar got stuck with the caste census.
“I told him that he had to conduct the caste census… as did the RJD. The other side put pressure on him because the BJP does not want an X-Ray of this country… then everybody will know how many OBCs, Dalits and tribals are there in India,” Gandhi said.
The Bihar government was the first state to hold a caste census last year. Going by the data, other backward and extremely backward classes constituted 63 per cent of the state’s population of 13 crore.
