Day One of Monsoon Session: In unity show, Nitish, Lalu’s sons share ride to House

The five-day monsoon session of the Bihar assembly began on a stormy note on Monday, forcing the Speaker to adjourn the House minutes later.

The five-day monsoon session of the Bihar assembly began on a stormy note on Monday, forcing the Speaker to adjourn the House minutes later, after customary obituary references, even as the Opposition BJP kept pressing for the resignation of deputy chief minister Tejashwi Prasad Yadav, citing the charge sheet filed against him by the CBI in the land for jobs case.

At the Bihar Assembly on Monday. (Santosh Kumar/HT)

Earlier, chief minister Nitish Kumar arrived at the assembly along with Tejashwi Yadav and environment minister Tej Pratap Yadav, a gesture which, as one of his party leaders put, was designed to send a clear message that the Janata Dal-United’s alliance with the Rashtriya Janata Dal led by Lalu Prasad Yadav was intact and strong.

As the session got underway, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) made it clear it would not back down.

BJP chief whip Janak Singh led the party’s offensive as soon as Speaker Awadh Bihar Choudhary ended his opening speech. Singh said the presence of a “charge sheeted minister” in the House was not good. Choudhary admonished the BJP leader for speaking without his permission and said the assembly should stick to the listed agenda. BJP members, however, continued to shout slogans against Tejashwi.

Amid the din, finance minister Vijay Kumar Choudhary tabled the first supplementary budget of 2023-24 for ₹43,774.75 crore before the assembly was adjourned for the day due to the disruptions.

BJP continued its campaign against Tejashwi outside.

Leader of Opposition in the assembly, Vijay Kumar Sinha, told reporters BJP will continue to raise the issue of corruption and the presence of a charge-sheeted minister. “It is the same chief minister who sought resignation from several ministers of his own party and alliance partners at the mere lodging of FIR. But he has now compromised with corruption. We want the CM’s reply on the circumstances that have made him compromise and the utter disregard to his own ‘zero tolerance to corruption’ policy,” he said.

Sinha said that in the past, Nitish Kumar forced former CM Jitan Ram Manjhi, JD-U’s RN Singh and Manju Verma, and RJD’s Kartikey Singh to resign as soon as their names figured in an FIR or a charge sheet.

Tejashwi Yadav’s mother and former chief minister Rabri Devi rubbished the Opposition’s demand, pointing out that this was not the first charge sheet in the case filed by the agency. Besides, she underlined, the BJP used central agencies to target Opposition leaders. “Anybody speaking against them becomes their target and there will be a charge sheet. All federal agencies are used to silence the Opposition. The fact is that Narendra Modi has done nothing… He has just looted public money to build party offices. BJP is more corrupt,” she told reporters outside the legislative council, of which she is a member.

The latest charge sheet is CBI’s second in the land for jobs case and first that names Tejashwi. Earlier, a charge sheet was filed in October 2022 against 16 people, including Lalu, Rabri and their daughter Misa Bharti.

The charge sheet alleges that the railways first appointed people in Group-D jobs during Lalu Yadav’s stint as railway minister between 2004 and 20009 and then regularised their appointment in violation of recruitment norms. The candidates, directly or through their immediate family members, allegedly sold land to the family members of Lalu Prasad at discounted rates of up to one-fourth to one-fifth of prevailing market rates.

On Sunday, Tejashwi Yadav had rejected BJP’s demand for his resignation. “Whenever we defeat the BJP in Bihar and make them run, they take recourse to charge sheet and raids by misusing federal agencies. This is an old game of BJP. It does not make any difference to us,” he had said.