Nitish Kumar at the news meet in Patna on Monday. Picture by Deepak Kumar

Patna, Aug. 8: Chief minister Nitish Kumar today slammed the Centre for its “growing discriminatory attitude” towards Bihar. “Never before did India have such an unfair and biased dispensation at the top,” he said.

Replying to a query on Bengal getting the package of Rs 21,614 crore, he said, “I have no objection at all to Bengal getting the package. What pains me is the fact that the Centre is brazenly behaving in a step motherly fashion towards Bihar. It has not taken notice of 1.25 crore people submitting their signature to the prime minister for the special category status.”

“We have been demanding the special category status and special packages for the past six years,” Nitish said, adding, “The only option left with us is to go to the people. Rather than responding to the people’s demand, the Centre has been curtailing the grants it had been giving to the state.”

The chief minister pointed out that the Centre had been paying Rs 1000 crore as compensation for the separation of forest and mineral rich Jharkhand from Bihar in 2000. ”We asked for raising the compensation amount to Rs 4000 crore. But we are not sure if the Centre will even continue with Rs 1000 crore in the next Five-Year Plan.”

Sharing the CM’s anguish on the issue, Saibal Gupta, the director of the Asian Development Research Institute (ADRI) which had prepared the documents supporting the state’s claim for special category status, said: “Bihar never had and will never have any objection to any of the eastern states — of which we are a part — getting Centre’s benevolence.”

Saibal, however, described it to be a “dangerous” trend to dole out benevolence only to the states under the rule of the political outfits at the Centre. “The move is dangerous in the sense that it curtails the options for the states to pursue their separate and independent political lines,” he said.

Nitish described the cabinet sub-committee constituted by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to study Bihar’s demand for special category status as an “eye wash”.