Patna, Feb. 13: Chief minister Nitish Kumar wants the Election Commission to take a stern action against Union law minister Salman Khurshid for the latter’s comment on minority reservation.

“The Election Commission is a constitutional body and its orders have legal sanction,” he told reporters today, describing the letter written by the poll panel to the President as an “unprecedented and serious” issue.

Chief Election Commissioner S.Y. Quraishi had taken an extraordinary step of approaching the President to seek “immediate and decisive intervention” against Khurshid for his defiance on the minority reservation. Censured for statements on the minority quota, Khurshid was quoted as saying “even if the Election Commission hangs me, I will ensure that Muslims get their due”. Nitish said: “The Centre should take up the case seri-ously. The Prime Minister is supposed to ensure that his ministers behave in a disciplined way. But here we have a party (the Congress) that says it respects constitutional norms, but its government is not serious about it.”

The chief minister also took a dig at the Congress’s promise for reservation for the minorities. “Why has not the government done it so far? Why wait for the Uttar Pradesh elections?” he asked, alleging that the Congress has a track record of “singing different tunes” to suit various occasions. Nitish said: “When the Mandal Commission recommendations were being discussed in Parliament, the then leader of the Opposition, Rajiv Gandhi, spoke three hours against the recommen-dations. And see what they are saying now. The Congress issues statements on issues on the belief that public memory is short.” Nitish added that the Centre should adopt the Bihar pattern for reservation, which bifurcates the backward castes in Other Backward Castes (OBCs) and Extremely Backward Castes (EBCs), “There are sections of Muslims in both the OBC and EBC categories in Bihar. If the Centre wants to give Muslims above this, they should have made a move,” he added.

Asked if there was any chance of a return of Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamul Congress to the NDA fold, Nitish said he did not foresee any such possibility. He added: “My statement is based on the ground realities of politics in Bengal.”