Bihar ministers and Grand Alliance leaders stayed away from International Day of Yoga events - including the one at Gandhi Maidan - held in the state capital on Tuesday.
They appeared to have taken cue from chief minister Nitish Kumar's recent statements urging Prime Minister Narendra Modi to impose countrywide prohibition before propagating yoga.
Bharat Swabhiman Trust, one of the Patanjali group of institutions of Baba Ramdev, had invited Bihar ministers, legislators and leaders to the event at Gandhi Maidan. Some had even agreed to attend, but none turned up.
Vacant chairs reserved for Grand Alliance leaders with their names pasted on them marked the event at which Union communications minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and other BJP leaders performed asanas (postures) and pranayama (breathing exercises) for over 45 minutes.
Anil Kumar, the Patna in-charge of Bharat Swabhiman Trust, said he and his team had taken care to invite all senior leaders of the state, including Nitish, RJD chief Lalu Prasad and his minister-sons Tejaswi and Tej Pratap, and Bihar Pradesh Congress Committee president and education minister Ashok Choudhary.
"Yoga is not of any particular party and our Hardwar-based headquarters had decided to invite people from all parties," he said. "The presence of leaders from different parties together at the Yoga Day function would have sent a positive message to the masses and would have encouraged the cause of yoga. Tej Pratap and a few other leaders had assured us they would come, but none turned up."
Though Grand Alliance members asserted that yoga was a matter of personal choice and should not be made an object of public display, the complete absence of RJD, JDU and Congress leaders and workers from Yoga Day functions - on a day when Modi stressed in Chandigarh that "yoga is not a religious practice and should not be dragged into controversy" - raised eyebrows in Patna.
JDU spokesperson and MLC Neeraj Kumar pointed out that Nitish, at a JDU conference at Palamu in Jharkhand on Sunday, had challenged Modi to ban liquor as "yoga's first principle is staying away from consumption of liquor and it (Yoga Day) would be irrelevant without a ban on liquor".
Neeraj said: "Our chief minister has repeatedly said yoga is a way of life and not a one-day event. Yoga is personal practice and is not an object of public display. Prohibition is necessary to fulfil the objective of yoga, but those at the Centre are not paying attention to this."
He added that seeing the physique of several BJP leaders, including its national president Amit Shah, it did not seem that they regularly practised yoga.
In comparison, Neeraj said, Nitish was an ardent practitioner of yoga.
Medical experts, however, rejected the chief minister's claim that prohibition of alcohol is a pre-requisite to gaining the health benefits of yoga and point to evidence suggesting that yoga itself will help reduce alcohol consumption.
"Yoga's benefits on the human body have been proven beyond doubt - and a small amount of alcohol will not take away the positive effects of yoga," said Subhash Manchanda, a senior consultant cardiologist at the Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, New Delhi, who has studied the health impacts of yoga for years.
There is evidence that yoga itself will help reduce alcohol dependence, Manchanda told The Telegraph.
Two years ago, public health specialist Mats Hallgren at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and his colleagues showed that a 10-week yoga course could reduce the alcohol use by alcohol-dependent persons.
Their study, published in the research journal Complementary Therapies in Medicine, found that alcohol use reduced from an average of 6.42 drinks a day to 3.3 drinks a day in a group of persons doing the yoga course, while there was little change in the drinking amounts among persons who did not take up the course.
Senior BJP leader and former deputy chief minister Sushil Kumar Modi said had Nitish made yoga a part of the educational syllabus in the state, students would not have fallen prey to alcohol and tobacco use at a tender age.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY G.S. MUDUR
