Patna: Catapulted out of power in Bihar, the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) on July 31 mounted its offensive against Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, asking him to quit the chair until he got clean cheat from court in a murder case pending against him.
Talking to media persons, former RJD MP Jagadanad Singh dubbed Nitish as the “biggest patron of criminals”, and said he as was the only chief minister in the country against whom a murder case is pending.
“He is an accused in murder of one Sitaram Singh in 1991, and it is considered a highest nature of crime under the Indian Penal Code (IPC). It’s not a civil kind of dispute,” Singh said.
Sitaram Singh was killed at a booth in Pandarak during a mid-term poll Lok Sabha poll in 1991.
A Barh court had taken cognisance of a complaint case lodged against Nitish and ordered for trial under sections 147, 148, 149, 302, 307 of the IPC and section 27 of Arms Act. However, the Patna high court had stayed the proceedings.
A video clip with statements of the victim’s family was also displayed during Singh’s meeting, in which the witnesses feared a design to annihilate them. They alleged that the security provided to them by the police was withdrawn, leaving them at the mercy of God.
Smelling a rat in the seeking of the high court’s stay on proceedings in the Barh murder case and the subsequent withdrawal of security to the victims, the RJD senior apprehended it might turn out to be a ‘Vyapam-like’ case in which over 40 witnesses were killed since the investigating agency took up the case.
Singh said the party was expecting that Nitish, who quit as the CM merely on the basis of an FIR lodged against former Deputy CM Tejashwi Prasad Yadav, would not compromise on his principle of probity and clean image.
“The way Nitish stepped down on Tejashwi issue, people of Bihar were expecting that leaders with clean image would take over in the changed regime. But that did not happen. Those responsible for bringing ‘jungle raj’ slur on RJD government in the past are now firmly standing with Nitish,” he alleged.
To buttress his point, Singh claimed Nitish was drawing strength from don-turned politicians like Anant Singh, Munna Shukla and Sunil Pandey to quell rebellion within the party.
“Even in the Barh murder case, he has been made co-accused along with notorious gangsters like Dular Chand Yadav and Dilip Singh (brother of Anant Singh),” he said.
RJD chief Lalu Prasad had also raked up the issue on the day when Nitish walked out of the Grand Alliance (GA) and stepped down as the CM.
India Tribune, as an English weekly newspaper, was launched in 1977 in Chicago by its publisher Prashant Shah with a lofty ideal to serve the Asian Indian community in the USA. Over the years, it has grown with all vigor, and now it is being published in three editions – Chicago, New York and Atlanta. India Tribune, a journal of its kind for the family in the USA, has been a household name for many Indians for over three decades with each issue commanding a readership of over 125,000.
