Chief minister Nitish Kumar ended his 24-hour fast against the land acquisition bill at the state JDU office just after sunrise on Sunday and left for official engagements in Madhubani, drawing flak later in the day from his political foes as well as a friend.

Senior RJD leader and former Union minister Raghuvansh Prasad Singh, whose party is an ally of Nitish's JDU, said the chief minister should have hit the streets instead of going on fast. The BJP termed it a ploy to mislead people on the land acquisition bill.

Nitish had started his fast on Saturday and had declared that the state government would not implement the law even if it were passed in Parliament. The land acquisition bill was cleared in the Lok Sabha on Tuesday.

The chief minister ended his 24-hour fast around 6am, a minute after the scheduled time of sunrise in the city at 5.59am. Without wasting any time, he started for Madhubani.

As the day progressed, leaders started dissecting Nitish's fast. The most surprising statement came from the RJD's Raghuvansh.

"The fast is the last political weapon used by a politician," Raghuvansh said, who hit the streets with RJD boss Lalu Prasad in protest against the land acquisition bill later in the day.

The BJP aimed its gun at both Nitish and Lalu. "Both of them should hold dharnas, fasts and hunger strikes on a weekly basis on one pretext or another. Both of them are trying to mislead the people on the land acquisition bill, Both of them have not pointed out anything in the bill which is anti-farmer," said former deputy chief minister and senior BJP leader Sushil Kumar Modi.

Modi said it was for the states to decide if they wanted to implement the new law or not and Nitish had resorted to political deceit by declaring that the state government would not implement it. Modi wondered how Nitish could implement development projects without acquiring land.

Leader of Opposition in the Assembly Nand Kishore Yadav declared both the hunger strike (of Nitish) and the (Lalu's) march to Raj Bhavan were political drama. "The two should stage a hunger strike for bringing development to a halt in Bihar," he said.

Dissident JDU MLA Rajiv Ranjan also charged Nitish and Lalu with misleading the people on the new land bill. "If it is not amended, people will have to wait for years to get compensation," he said, stressing that landowners would get four times the market rate of their land under the new act.