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The violence in Bihar during Ram Navami has opened up a line of attack for the BJP, with the Opposition party alleging that the law-and-order situation has deteriorated after Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and the Janata Dal (United) joined hands with Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) president Lalu Prasad and Deputy CM Tejashwi Prasad Yadav.
The first salvos were fired by Union Home Minister Amit Shah who said at a rally in a Nawada on April 2 that if the BJP returns to power in the state in 2025 it would “hang rioters upside down”. The Union Home Ministry also urged Bihar Governor R V Arlekar to take stock of the law-and-order situation following the violence that rocked Sasaram and Biharsharif, which are the district headquarters of Nalanda and Rohtas.
Alleging that the failure to stop the violence was because of the influence of the RJD, which consistently faces “Jungle Raj” jibes from its rivals. “Jungle Raj” is used to describe the poor law-and-order situation in Bihar during Lalu’s tenure as Chief Minister. With Shah setting the tempo, state BJP leaders intensified the attack on the “Mahagathbandan (Grand Alliance)” government. Rajya Sabha MP and former Deputy CM Sushil Kumar Modi alleged, “The Nitish Kumar government failed to control a law-and-order situation for the first time in 17 years. There was a delay in the deployment of paramilitary forces and flag march in Biharsharif and Sasaram.”
BJP’s Other Backward Classes (OBC) Morcha national general secretary and party spokesperson Nikhil Anand likened the Bihar CM to Mohammed bin Tughlaq, the 14th-Century Sultan of Delhi, for being “unsure and mercurial” and said the rule of the Nitish government marked a “rerun of jungle raj”.
“Just as Tughlaq showed a lack of coordination in his governance, the Nitish Kumar government lacks coordination between district administration and state secretariat and CM office. First, the Rohtas administration said there were prohibitory orders in place in the town and later denied it when they sensed that Shah cannot hold a public meeting in Sasaram. Similarly, the Nalanda administration started making the curfew announcement on April 1 but soon denied it saying there were only prohibitory orders in force.”
Nitish Kumar did not directly respond to Shah’s jibes but said on Sunday, “Police are identifying those who fomented trouble. Gadbad karnewale ko spare nahi kiya jayega (Those who created trouble would not be spared).” While the Nalanda Police have so far arrested 130 people, 43 have been arrested in Rohtas.
JD(U) national president Rajeev Ranjan Singh, popularly known as Lalan Singh, responded to Shah, tweeting on Monday, “Your (Shah’s) speech in Nawada shows that Badka Jhuttha Party has become desperate and is nervous. We have no issues with you speaking to Bihar’s governor even 10 times a day. People of West Bengal, Kerala, and Maharashtra are witnesses to the way in which you use the office of a governor for your political advantages. If you wish, you can even open your office in Raj Bhavan in the 2024 polls but the result will be similar to the 2015 Assembly polls. The country will be BJP-free in 2024.”
RJD national spokesperson Subodh Kumar Mehta told The Indian Express, “It has become very cliched to use ‘jungle raj’ to attack our government. We would like to know from Shah how only two out of about 2,000 Ram Navami processions witnessed communal violence. Was it a coincidence that Biharsharif and Sasaram were close to the rally venues of Shah? Does the biggest party in the world want to win by fomenting communal tensions? We also take serious exception to the country’s Home Minister saying that they would ‘hang rioters upside down’. It shows the BJP’s medieval mindset. Someone should remind Shah that we are a democracy.”
