The Bihar BJP hit the roads to up the ante against the Grand Alliance on corruption.

On Wednesday the party organised protests across the state to raise various issues concerning people, but the main agenda remained corruption and at the centre of the attack lay RJD chief Lalu Prasad and his family members who are purportedly facing an income tax department investigation in connection with assets acquired over a period of time.

While the BJP is going gung-ho on the issue, the JDU, an alliance partner of Lalu's RJD, is maintaining a stoic silence, claiming that the party would take a stand only after understanding the purpose and seeing the outcome of the income-tax searches on Tuesday.

"Our party has come out with a series of documents exposing the ill-gotten money of Lalu and his family. Now, we are taking the same issue to the people's court by organising a state-wide protest programme," said BJP state unit president Nityanand Rai, who led the protest in Patna.

A host of senior BJP leaders, including its legislature party leader and former deputy chief minister Sushil Kumar Modi, took part in the protest. Rai said Wednesday's protest was organised in all district headquarters and now the party would take the protest to the grassroots so that more people could be made aware of corruption and other issues.

"We would soon discuss details of the programmes," he said, adding that the list of corruption-related issues would get longer in the days to come, as the party was in the process of collecting more facts related to the issue.

Modi, on the other hand, stuck to his old demand of removing Lalu's sons Tejashwi Prasad and Tej Pratap from the council of ministers, claiming that by not doing so chief minister Nitish Kumar was trying to protect Lalu's sons because they had not declared details of assets owned by them in the annual declaration made by ministers.

While the BJP launched a vehement attack on Lalu and his family, terming them "epitome of corruption", the JDU, which has formed a government in Bihar in alliance with the RJD, refused to openly support Lalu on the I-T searches. The RJD called the searches an effort by the Centre to crush the Opposition's voice.

"Let the purpose and outcome of the raids be notified by the income tax department. Only then can we comment on the issue," JDU national general secretary K.C. Tyagi said when asked if the party considered the raids an act of political vendetta.

Countered by a question that his party had been demanding action against "benami" property after demonetisation, Tyagi repeated the same but added: "Our leader Nitish Kumar had supported demonetisation."

When Nityanand Rai was asked whether he considered the JDU stand on the I-T searches a kind of tacit support for the BJP, he said the party's fight was against corruption and one could not forget that corruption was taking place with Nitish at the helm. "The chief minister is protecting corrupt people," he said.