Patna, May 23: Simmering discontent over the lack of a road and electricity today exploded on Nitish Kumar with a group of irate villagers pelting stones at his convoy in Buxar district where the chief minister is on his Seva Yatra.

Nitish though was unhurt and neither was the SUV in which he was travelling damaged. The chief minister is on a three-day Seva Yatra to the central Bihar district, about 170km west of Patna, to assess governance at the grassroots.

For the past several months, residents of Narbatpur village had been demanding a pathway to connect their hamlet to the 40-km road leading from Buxar to Chausa, the site of the historic battle in which Sher Shah vanquished Mughal Emperor Humayun in 1539. The villagers were also incensed by the lack of electricity for the past two months because of a burnt transformer.

Local sources said the district administration had promised to build the approach road from the village and repair the transformer ahead of the Seva Yatra. The locals had been expecting Nitish, who was on a tour of Chausa fort, to stop at their village. The chief minister went to the fort around 7am but did not stop at Narbatpur, which lies midway between Buxar and Chausa.

The villagers continued to wait, hoping that Nitish would stop on the return journey. But the managers of the Seva Yatra chose to bypass the village and instead continued along the Chausa-Buxar road that runs along the embankment of a canal about 300 metres from the village. When they heard the news, the villagers hurried towards the canal.

There too, the convoy of 20 vehicles did not stop. Nitish’s SUV, which was the third vehicle from the front, sped past. This angered the locals who hurled stones, sticks and farming tools they had with them at the vehicles at the rear of the convoy, severely damaging eight of them. Most of the vehicles had their windscreens and lights smashed and door handles broken.

No one, though, was injured in the attack. “Police acted swiftly to disperse the crowd,” said a Buxar district official who was part of the convoy. After travelling for some distance, the chief minister stopped and asked his officials to bring some of the villagers before him so that he could hear their problems.

The incident has assumed political overtones because RJD’s Jagdanand Singh represents the Buxar seat in the Lok Sabha. Jagdanand has locked horns with Nitish who has prevented him from using his MPLAD fund to install transformers in his constituency. Moreover, the attackers were mostly drawn from the Yadav community, still believed to be the core vote base of the RJD.

RJD chief Lalu Prasad dubbed the Seva Yatra as “dhong (hypocrisy)”, alleging that Nitish was a “very arrogant” leader dreaming to become Prime Minister.

“With blinkers of arrogance on his vision, Nitish is unable to see the anger the people have against his government. The people just vented their anger at his (Nitish’s) failure to provide basic necessities like road, electricity and drinking water,” Lalu said.