Lalu Prasad

Patna, Dec. 21: Defeat has done to Lalu Prasad what age couldn’t do. It has made him calm and patient.

Chairing the post-poll review meet at his residence on 10, Circular Road, the RJD chief gave a patient hearing to the explanations put forward by the defeated party candidates.

“For a change, Lalu Prasad was mellowed down and heard the clarifications of the candidates one by one. Earlier, he used to shout down a person if or she cited sabotage or loss of core voters as the reason behind the defeat,” said a party member.

RJD’s poll debacle review, held today after a gap of almost one month, saw partymen avoiding the main issue of declining vote share.

The meeting, which started in the morning and continued till late evening, was a closed-door affair.

“I was there for half-an-hour. Most candidates were blaming their defeat on the internal sabotage carried out by partymen who were denied tickets. There were others who blamed their defeat on use of money and liquor. Some defeated candidates claimed tampering of EVMs as the reason for their defeat but failed to provide any evidence,” said former MP and RJD leader Prabhunath Singh while speaking to The Telegraph.

The RJD chief avoided the media after the meeting. Senior leaders like Raghuvansh Prasad Singh, who spoke to reporters, appeared more focused on criticising the Nitish government rather than “introspecting own performance”.

There were others who pointed towards the strong “social base” of the RJD and the fact that 61 per cent of the voters were still not in favour of Nitish.

Incidentally, two MPs of the party — Uma Shankar Singh and Jagdanand Singh — were not present at the meeting which has been postponed twice after the election results were announced.

Some of the RJD leaders also questioned the continuation of RJD’s alliance with the LJP. “The fact remains that the percentage of votes of the party is declining,” said former MLA Ramanuj Prasad.

Even senior party leaders like former Union minister Raghunath Jha stressed that the party’s alliance should have been with the Congress.

“There are a large number of leaders in both the RJD and the LJP who think that the alliance is not workable at the ground level,” said a senior RJD leader pointing out that even LJP leaders like Maheshwar Singh and former MP Surajbhan Singh had demanded scrapping of the alliance in the past.

The review meet disappointed a large number of party leaders. “Key issues like why our vote percentage is slipping continuously, why Muslim votes are becoming more and more elusive, why could we not take advantage of the disenchantment in upper castes against Nitish Kumar, where our campaigning went wrong during the polls and several other issues remained untouched. Blaming EVM malfunction and claiming that the party still wielded influence over a section of voters will not help,” said a former RJD minister.