Patna, Sept. 9: The refusal of the RJD to vacate the room number 129 of Parliament has boiled down to jibes and counter-jibes on the diminishing status of Lalu Prasad in his home state.
On Friday, JD(U) spokesperson and MLC Sanjay Singh shot-off a letter to the RJD chief stressing that his act of refusing the room was demeaning to the image of Bihar. “You had been in power in Bihar for a long time. As a Union cabinet minister you wielded so much power that the Union cabinet meeting were held at night on your insistence. Today you are fighting for just one room,” Singh said in his letter, justifying the Lok Sabha Speaker’s decision to allot the room to Trinamul Congress.
Singh’s letter also mentions about Lalu’s joke on Anna Hazare’s fast and the powerful stature of suspended IAS officer S.S. Verma during the Lalu-Rabri era. The RJD leaders are livid about Singh’s letter to their leader. “Sanjay Singh should remember his own political status. He first clung on to the LJP chief, Ram Vilas Paswan, and then defected to Nitish Kumar,” RJD MP Ram Kripal Yadav said.
Justifying his leader’s stand on vacating the room in Parliament, Yadav said: “There is no other place in Parliament where the party MPs and leaders can sit together and discuss issues.”
The RJD sources claimed that the order to vacate the room was fallout of the “no love lost” relationship between Speaker Meira Kumar and Lalu. Before the last Lok Sabha polls, when the RJD-Congress alliance was intact, Lalu reportedly did not want the sitting candidate, Meira, to contest the Sasaram reserved parliamentary seat. The recent tirade of the RJD on the arrest of personal assistant of Lok Sabha Speaker has only added to the cold war between the two.
The JD(U) leaders in general appear to be happy over the room episode. “It only exposes the diminishing status of the leader who was once recognised as the Mandal Messiah in the 1990s. Even Prime Ministers used to keep him in good humour. The same man is now pleading for his own perks and privileges,” remarked a senior JD(U) leader.
