Bihar Deputy Chief Minister Sushil Kumar Modi alleged on Wednesday that RJD chief Lalu Prasad had met Union Minister Arun Jaitley with the offer to help bring down the Grand Alliance government if fodder scam cases against him were watered down.
Addressing a press conference, Mr. Modi claimed that Mr. Jaitley, however, snubbed Lalu, who approached him through his emissary — former Union Minister Prem Chand Gupta — and also met him in person.
Slamming Lalu for “always spewing venom against the BJP-RSS combine but never shying away from seeking our help whenever it serves his purpose”, the BJP leader said Mr. Jaitley curtly told them that the CBI is an autonomous agency in whose functioning the government does not interfere.
Lalu’s son and Leader of the Opposition in the State Assembly, Tejashwi Yadav, rejected the allegation, and said it reflected the BJP’s worry of an impending electoral defeat.
“His allegations that we sought help from the BJP at any point of time show his mental bankruptcy and worry of an impending defeat in the elections. The entire country knows that it was Lalu who had stopped (LK) Advani’s Ayodhya Rath Yatra and has always valiantly fought their communal agenda,” he tweeted.
After their dismal performance in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections when a Narendra Modi wave swept the country, Nitish Kumar’s JD(U), RJD and the Congress had formed a grand alliance and stopped the BJP’s juggernaut in Bihar in the 2015 Assembly polls.
The three-party alliance was in power till July 2017 when Mr. Kumar returned to the NDA following sharp differences with the RJD over allegations of corruption against Tejashwi, who was then the Deputy Chief Minister.
“We think the Chief Minister too must have got a whiff of these shenanigans. Moreover, after they together won the Assembly polls in 2015 and RJD emerged as the largest party, Lalu and his cohorts never lost an opportunity to remind the JD(U) leader that he owed his position to them,” he said.