New Delhi: Nitish Kumar took oath as the Chief Minister of Bihar for a record ninth time, at the head of a government in partnership with the BJP. This is also the fifth time in a decade the 72-year-old has changed camp.
Earlier, after resigning as the Bihar CM, Nitish Kumar indicated that he was not happy with the way things were going in the INDIA bloc that he helped take shape. “You all know how I came to this alliance and also how I worked to bring together so many parties. But of late, things were not working well. INDIA bloc failed my expectations,” the JD(U) president said.
He alleged the JD(U) has been doing a lot of work in Bihar, but the “others” have not done anything much.
“I have been working hard to make a successful, meaningful (INDIA) alliance, but no one else (in the alliance) has been doing anything… Gathbandhan main bhi gadbad chal rahan hai (something is wrong in the alliance). People are not happy,” Nitish Kumar told reporters.
KC Tyagi, senior JD(U) leader and political advisor to Nitish said, “Congress’s irresponsible and obstinate behaviour has shattered the INDIA bloc, which is on the verge of disintegration.”
Soon after Nitish Kumar resigned from the CM’s post, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge said that he knew it would happen. “There are many people in the country like ‘aaya Ram-gaya Ram’,” he said. “Earlier he and us were fighting together. When I talked to Lalu ji and Tejashwi, they also said that Nitish is going. If he wanted to stay, he would have stayed but he wants to go. That’s why we already knew this, but to keep the INDIA bloc intact, if we say something wrong, the wrong message will be sent. This information was already given to us by Lalu Prasad Yadav and Tejashwi Yadav.
Senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor took a swipe at Nitish Kumar, dubbing him a “snollygoster” or a shrewd and unprincipled politician. He shared his social media post from 2017 when Kumar had broken away from the Mahagathbandhan or the grand alliance in Bihar with the Rashtriya Janata Dal and Congress and returned to the BJP despite being foes for a long time.
“Word of the day! Definition of *snollygoster* US dialect: a shrewd, unprincipled politician. First Known Use: 1845. Most recent use: 26/7/17,” Tharoor had tweeted in 2017.
Tejashwi Yadav, the former Bihar Deputy Chief Minister, called his former ally Nitish Kumar a “Chief Minister who was already a tired man”. “It seems we made a tired CM (chief minister) work. The game is not over yet,” Tejashwi Yadav, the son of Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) chief Lalu Yadav, told reporters.
“Khel abhi shuru hua hai, khel abhi baki hain (game has just started, it is not over yet). What I say, I do… I can give you in writing that the JD(U) will be finished in 2024. The public is with us,” the outgoing Deputy Chief Minister said. “I want to thank the BJP that it got ready to induct his (Nitish Kumar’s) party in their alliance,” he added.
Tejashwi Yadav also credited the Mahagathbandhan, or the Grand Alliance, for the development that Bihar had seen in the past 17 months.
