'When your chacha comes back after having mamu's chai...': Kharge's advice on Nitish
Mallikarjun Kharge said Tejashwi and Lalu Prasad Yadav should shut their doors for Nitish Kumar when he next hops back from NDA to opposition.
Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, speaking at Patna's Jan Vishwas Rally on Sunday said when Nitish Kumar comes back again seeking an alliance with the RJD, the doors should be shut in his face. Even after back-to-back cases, Lalu Prasad Yadav never bowed down before the BJP, Kharge said adding, 'But your chacha (uncle) did' -- referring to Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar whom former Bihar deputy chief minister Tejashwi used to call uncle. "Now he is saying main thode din ke liye bahar gaya tha...(I left NDA for a few days) Now I am back and will be at your feet. This is what Nitish said. Aapke chacha toh mamu ke chai pine gaye hain. Lekin kal wo chai pi ke wapas ayenge. Phir nahi lena aapko. (Your uncle has gone to have mamu's chai (a dig at Narendra ModiB). But tomorrow, he will want to come back. Don't take him then," Kharge said adding that those whose political fight is not ideological should not be accepted in the INDIA bloc.
Nitish Kumar's volte face ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha election was the major twist as he was one of the key forces behind uniting the regional parties and bringing them together under INDIA bloc. Nitish Kumar hosted the first meeting of the opposition alliance in 2023 in Patna even before the alliance got its INDIA name, which apparently did not have Nitish Kumar's endorsement. As he walked out of the alliance and joined the NDA -- repeating history -- the government in Bihar changed while he remained at the helm.
Since then Nitish Kumar has been asserting that he will now stay with the NDA and will not go anywhere. On Saturday, sharing the stage with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Nitish Kumar promised PM Modi that he would now stay with the NDA.
The Jan Vishwas Rally in Patna is the biggest assembly of the opposition leaders in the state after Nitish Kumar's exit from INDIA. Apart from Mallikarjun Kharge, Rahul Gandhi, Lalu Yadav, Tejashwi Yadav, Sitaram Yechury, D Raja, Dipankar Bhattacharya spoke at the rally. Akhilesh said in the first list of candidates, BJP did not announce any name from Bihar because the party knew that it would lose in Bihar in the Lok Sabha election 2024,