
Maverick Tej Pratap celebrates with cake
• The RJD was supposed to be in mourning after RJD chief Lalu Prasad was sent to jail. There was no dahi-chura feast at 10 Circular Road on Sunday for Makar Sankranti, with the family saying they will not celebrate the occasion as Lalu is in jail. However, Lalu's elder son Tej Pratap did celebrate the third foundation day of the DSS (Dharm-nirupaksha Swayamsevak Sangh), an outfit he created to counter the RSS. Tej Pratap cut an 11-pound cake and held a drill with the DSS volunteers on Sunday. "He could have scaled down the celebrations," remarked a senior RJD leader. "It looks odd that the traditional dahi-chura feast was not held and on the same day a cake is cut."

True son
• Ever since RJD chief Lalu Prasad was sent to jail only one leader of the RJD has been consistently been in Ranchi: MLA Bhola Yadav. RJD circles are saying that it is Bhola who is actually playing the role of a son by sticking to Ranchi and running around lawyers to fight the RJD chief's legal battle. "Both Tej Pratap and Tejashwi did not find time to go to Ranchi. It was after more than 20 days that Tejashwi finally went to meet his father in jail along with Manoj Jha. Bhola has been camping there. To his credit Bhola says it Is Laluji who changed him from Bhola to Bhola Babu," said a senior RJD leader, recalling that Bhola Yadav had made his entry as an assistant to a lawyer of Lalu after the fodder scam broke out.
Missing special branch
• The attack on the convoy of chief minister Nitish Kumar in Buxar on Friday has several ruling party questioning the role and utility of the police's special branch, which is supposed to give specific inputs to the government on any place the Bihar CM visits. "But in this case the special branch appeared to have no clue about what was going to happen and the scale of violence and discontent," remarked a JDU MLC wondering what the SP and DM of Buxar were doing and if they had visited the village, where the CM's programme was being held, before. "The DM and SP do not appear to believe in field duty," remarked the JDU MLC.
Platter politics
• JDU state president Bashishtha Narayan Singh's feast on the occasion of Makar Sankranti caused heartburns in the RJD. Last year when the Grand Alliance was intact Singh had hosted a similar feast on the occasion. "But then he had invited many BJP leaders stressing that the feast had nothing to do with politics. But this time when he hosted the feast RJD leaders were not even invited," rued an RJD MLA stressing that "we should have read the tea leaves when we saw BJP leaders in Bashishtha Babu's feast last year". Former state Congress president Ashok Choudhary was at Bashishtha's feast this year, fuelling political speculations.