Nitish Kumar stepped down on his own, BJP did not push him out: Samrat Choudhary

Bihar Chief Minister Samrat Choudhary has said that his predecessor Nitish Kumar gave up the Chief Minister's post of his own accord and was not eased out by the BJP. Speaking at an event organised by a media group in Patna on Friday, Mr. Choudhary said the JD(U) president, now a Rajya Sabha member, continues to be the NDA's undisputed leader in Bihar.

Mr. Choudhary, the first BJP leader to head a government in the State, said Mr. Kumar had himself acknowledged that Atal Bihari Vajpayee had once allowed him to become Chief Minister when the BJP had more MLAs than his party, and that he now wished to reciprocate that gesture. He traced the reference to 2000, when a hung Assembly saw Mr. Kumar, then heading the Samata Party, take oath as Chief Minister and resign within a week after the NDA failed to muster a majority.

Highlighting what he described as the BJP's consistent support to Mr. Kumar, the Chief Minister also said RJD president Lalu Prasad owed his political stature to the blessings of the NDA's largest partner. He recalled that Mr. Prasad became Chief Minister in 1990 with the outside support of the BJP, a turn of events that he said had denied Dalit leader Ram Sundar Das his rightful claim. Mr. Das, who had a brief stint as Chief Minister in the 1970s, lost the legislative party leadership vote to Mr. Prasad by a narrow margin, a result analysts attribute to a split among upper-caste MLAs after another Janata Dal leader, Raghunath Jha, entered the contest.

Mr. Choudhary, who began his political career as a Minister in the Rabri Devi government, also pushed back at RJD working president and Leader of the Opposition Tejashwi Yadav, who has mocked him as a "selected, and not elected" leader. Without naming Mr. Yadav, the Chief Minister said his mother too had not been elected by the people when she first became Chief Minister, and that his party had not announced in advance that it would back him for the Deputy Chief Minister's post.

Asked whether he was confident of remaining in office until the next Assembly polls in 2030, Mr. Choudhary did not give a direct reply. He described himself as a small leader who owed his position to the blessings of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Mr. Kumar, noting that the party had made him State president, Deputy Chief Minister twice and, for the first time, given him the Home portfolio, which had earlier rested with the Chief Minister.

He said his priorities were law and order and education, along with better revenue generation through industrialisation. The government, he added, was tackling the current floods effectively with assistance from the Centre and was working on long-term measures such as the inter-linking of rivers.