Rabri happy with secondary role
Lalu Prasad out of jail, his wife Rabri Devi has switched to the role of homemaker from an active politician. fter Lalu was convicted in a fodder scam case, Rabri chaired the meeting of the party cadre and addressed a series of public meetings in the state’s hinterland, drawing appreciable crowd. Now, she is said to be busy with cooking and other household chores. She has proved to be a very successful “stopgap” arrangement in the RJD in Lalu’s absence for the past 16 years. She came out of kitchen to become the chief minister when Lalu went to jail in the same fodder scam case (RC-29A/96). Despite being the chief minister, she preferred to remain in the background whenever Lalu came out of jail in the late 1990s and early 2000. He used to chair the meetings with officials and take important decisions in those periods. Even after coming out on bail this time, it was Lalu who met Sonia Gandhi in a bid to forge a tie-up with the Congress and is learnt to be engaged in overt and covert operations to build a secular alliance in the state. The grapevine has it that Rabri might come to the forefront during the Lok Sabha elections because Lalu might field her on the Saran seat. “But even if she wins, Laluji will do the actual job as an MP or the party boss. She will remain in the background even in that situation,” said an RJD insider. Academics are peeved at the state government for engaging the AN Sinha Institute of Social Studies in monitoring the chief minister’s fortnight-long flagship scheme of distributing scholarships and uniforms to the school children from December 16 to December 31. “The institute is not supposed to do such work. The government should have used its bureaucracy and other staff for such stuff,” said a researcher. The academics by and large felt that the institute was “forced” to monitor the scheme because it was dependent on the government’s aids and grants. The research institutions should be thoroughly independent and autonomous, feel researchers.Anything possible in field of politics
In the season of pre-poll alliance, Bihar BJP spearhead Sushil Kumar Modi has apparently befriended the Loktantrik Samata Party president Upendra Kushwaha — the man who had snatched his position as the Leader of Opposition in the Assembly in 2003. Modi was initially the leader of the Opposition bench because the BJP was the single largest opposition party when Rabri Devi formed the government. But Nitish Kumar’s Samata Party merged into Sharad Yadav’s JD(U), increasing the number of the JD(U) MLAs than that of the BJP. Kushwaha then was a “favourite” of Nitish Kumar and he helped the former to become the Leader of Opposition. Modi did not like Nitish’s “favour” to Kushwaha then. Later, Kushwaha revolted against Nitish and formed the Loktantrik Samata Party. Now, Modi is looking for a pre-poll tie-up with the party of Kushwaha, an emerging Koiri leader. Obviously, Nitish might not like it.
