Ranchi: Former Jharkhand chief minister Babulal Marandi on Thursday claimed that the Madhupur bye-election will be a rerun of the 2009 Tamar bypoll.
“I have said this on March 30, and I will repeat it again. In 2009, the then chief minister (Shibu Soren) had to resign after he lost in the Tamar bypoll. On May 2, the incumbent minister (Hafizul Hassan) will have to resign after he loses in Madhupur,” Marandi told reporters at the BJP state headquarters here.
Shibu had to resign from the CM’s post in January 2009 after he was handed a shock defeat by his opponent Gopal Krishna Patar (Raja Peter). Patar defeated Shibu by over 9,000 votes.
Hassan, the elder son of late minister and JMM stalwart Haji Hussain Ansari, was sworn in as a minister in February, a month before the bypoll was announced. He is up against BJP’s Ganga Narayan Singh.
Marandi, however, distanced himself from BJP’s Godda MP Nishikant Dubey’s statement. Addressing a public meeting before Singh’s nomination, Dubey had allegedly announced that BJP would form the government in Jharkhand by May 10 if Singh won the election. “A lot of people will say a lot of things, but I will not comment on his statement,” Marandi said.
Marandi said he was surprised by news reports which claimed that Jharkhand government had managed to spend 75% of its budgetary allocations for the 2020-21 FY. “After going through the papers, I rang up officers of the finance department to get a clearer picture. They said nearly 83% of the Budget has been spent. How can that be possible if the government claimed all the while that its coffers were empty, and it was not getting money from the Centre?” Marandi said.
“Like the Budget document, the government must issue a document detailing its expenditures,” he said.