Scrap alliance with RJD, says LJP leader

PATNA: In election year, all political parties find themselves besieged with dissidence. It is not only chief minister Nitish Kumar and state Congress president Anil Kumar Sharma who are being targeted by former friends within the party. It has spread to the RJD-LJP alliance also. On Tuesday, LJP leader in the assembly Maheshwar Singh demanded the scrapping of the RJD-LJP alliance.“The alliance is a liability for us,” he remarked while speaking to TOI.
Singh said that the people of Bihar were not willing to forgive Lalu Prasad for the 15 years of misrule which he inflicted on them during his regime. “The social and political ground realities are against this alliance. We paid heavily for this incompatible alliance in the Lok Sabha (LS) polls. There is a difference between general and by-election polls. The LJP gains nothing from the alliance. The RJD remains a political party having the support of a section of only one caste,” he remarked.
Incidentally, Singh has been elected from Harisidhi assembly seat from Purvi Champaran district which has been declared reserved after delimitation of seats. He reportedly wants to contest from adjoining Kesaria seat. The problem is that the RJD has already a sitting MLA, Pappu Dev. It is unwilling to budge on the issue.
“The seats which have a sitting MLA are not negotiable. If we start giving up sitting seats we may as well quit politics and go to the Himalayas for `dhyan’,” remarked former Union minister Akhilesh Prasad Singh stressing that the party chief Lalu Prasad will have a final say in the seats under the alliance. “But the theory `sitting-getting’ is the primary factor for any political alliance,” he remarked.
Both Lalu and LJP chief Ram Vilas Paswan have had to struggle hard to forge an alliance with each other after being political adversaries for a long time. Leaders of both political parties blamed it on the `unnatural alliance’ when the LJP-RJD alliance was virtually wiped out in the last LS polls. Both leaders conceded that the alliance had not worked at the grassroots because there was no time for them to get the workers of both parties to work together. The by-polls for 18 assembly seats held last year saw the RJD-LJP alliance bagging half the seats making both leaders stress that the alliance will continue.
However, with the assembly polls creeping near, the RJD-LJP will also be in strain with leaders of both political parties searching for winnable seats and combinations. “It is a natural phenomena which takes place in all political parties. It is going to trigger the `aya Ram gaya Ram’ politics again,” remarked a senior RJD MLA.