(Left) Bihar Congress in-charge CP Joshi and state chief Ashok Choudhary at Sadaquat Ashram on Saturday. Picture by Nagendra Kumar Singh

Patna, June 29: The Congress has kept all options open in the state ahead of next year’s general elections.

“We supported Nitish Kumar’s confidence motion in the Assembly as part of our commitment to secularism. It should, in no way, be treated as a move for an electoral alliance between the Congress and JD(U). The alliance is not on the party’s agenda as of now,” the newly appointed Congress general secretary in charge of Bihar, C.P. Joshi, told reporters here today.

Joshi parried when asked to clarify who was more secular — Nitish or Lalu Prasad. “I cannot give a qualified statement,” he said.

Some senior Congress leaders accompanying Joshi interpreted the latter’s statement as an “indication to keep the Congress’s door ajar for both at this stage”.

Sources in the JD(U) revealed that the party, which had been soft on the Congress for over a year now and is expecting the Centre to accede to its demand of special category status to Bihar, was working hard to cobble together an alliance with the Congress to consolidate its clout with minority votes in the wake of its split with the BJP.

However, the state still has a large number of senior Congress leaders willing to retain the alliance with Lalu as he had ensured over 14 per cent of his Yadav caste men and sizeable section of the Muslim votes in the party’s kitty. This section believes that the Congress leadership should evolve a “mechanism” to keep Lalu and Nitish both in the “grand secular alliance”.

Joshi, however, clarified: “As of now, we are concentrating hard on strengthening the Congress more in the state. Nobody is here to help us unless we strengthen our own feet in the state. You will know which party/parties we have chosen as our ally only at the time of the Lok Sabha elections.”

State Congress president Ashok Choudhary, Congress legislature party leader Sadanand Singh, AICC secretaries K.L. Sharma and Shakeel Ahmad Khan, senior party MLC Jyoti, Prem Chandra Mishra, Vinod Sharma and other senior leaders accompanied Joshi during the media visit to the state as its in-charge.

Asked whether Nitish is a secular leader, Joshi quipped: “There is no if and but (that Nitish is not a secular person).”

Joshi giving Nitish a certificate in secularism must have come as music to the ears of the chief minister as Joshi is the third senior Congress leader to appreciate Nitish’s secular credentials after his split with the BJP. Earlier, Union home minister Sushil Kumar Shinde and minority affairs minister K. Rahman Khan landed here to praise Nitish for upholding the cause of secularism at the time when the BJP leaders are flaying Nitish from all fronts.

Earlier, addressing block and district presidents, Joshi said that the Congress could think of cobbling an alliance only when it was strong enough on its own. “We can have an alliance at the time of the Lok Sabha polls. But the time has not come to say who will be our alliance partner/ partners at that time.”