Marandi skips Assembly session, scouts for allies

Faced with the rebel Five, who have demanded his ouster, Chief Minister Babulal Marandi is desperately on the look out for friends to save his seat of power. So, instead of attending the Assembly session today, Marandi sat at his State Secretariat office and reportedly spend a long time talking to Rashtriya Janata Dal’s Suresh Paswan over the telephone.

Last afternoon, Marandi had paid a surprise visit to the house of Jharkhand Mukti Morcha’s Sahshank Shekhar Bhokta, along with Independent MLA Madhav Lal Singh and BJP legislator Arvind Singh. They were closetted for over 45 minutes but the outcome of the meeting was not known. Paswan and Bhokta represent the Deoghar and Sarath seats in the Assembly, which fall in the Santhal Pargana division from where Marandi had begun his political career as a VHP pracharak in the 1980s.

On March 13, the state budget is slated to be presented before the Assembly. And the five rebels — Energy Minister Lalchand Mahato, Urban Development Minister Baccha Singh, PHED Minister Jaleshwar Mahato and Excise Minister Ramesh Singh Munda — can reduce the government to a minority if they withdraw support. At present, the state government is surviving on the support from 45 MLAs in the 82-member House.

The only comfort for Marandi is that the other NDA constituents have not joined the dissidents so far.