RJD leader Tejaswhi Yadav on Friday firmly ruled out the possibility of controversial Mokama MLA Anant Singh’s entry into the Grand Alliance in Bihar of which his party is the largest constituent.
Yadav, who is the leader of the opposition in the state assembly, made this clear in response to queries about Singh who has for the past few days been showering praises on RJD supremo Lalu Prasad while expressing his desire to contest the Lok Sabha polls from Munger.
“We cannot have bad elements like him into our party. His is an ideology that goes against the very idea of social justice which our party has always been committed to”, Yadav told reporters here.
Earlier, on Thursday Yadav’s elder brother Tej Pratap Yadav had said while responding to queries on the issue “the final call on such matters has to be taken by Lalu ji.
But entry of such people may send a wrong message”. Singh, a third-term MLA known for his strong-arm style of politics, has been saying that he will enter the fray from Munger even if it meant taking on Rajiv Ranjan alias Lalan who is at present an influential minister in the Nitish Kumar government in the state and whom the Mokama legislator is known to hold in high esteem.
As per the tentative seat-sharing arrangement among the NDA allies, the Lok Sabha seat which is currently represented by Lok Janshakti Party’s Veena Devi may now go to the JD(U) which is headed by the Chief Minister. It is believed that Kumar may field Lalan from the seat which the minister has represented in the past and from where he had contested as the party candidate in 2014 also. Veena Devi, who had initially thrown a fit saying she would seek re-election from Munger even if it required her to resign from the LJP - headed by Union minister Ram Vilas Paswan - has now changed tack and said she would be doing her party’s bidding.
Notably, her husband Suraj Bhan Singh is himself a history sheeter-turned-politician who enjoys the rank of a national vice-president in the party but stands disqualified from contesting elections on account of conviction in the murder of a former Bihar minister.
Suraj Bhan Singh is also known to have been involved in a running feud with the family of Anant Singh from whose elder brother Dilip he had wrested the Mokama seat in the 2000 assembly polls, vacating it four years later upon election to the Lok Sabha from the now-abolished Balia Lok Sabha seat.
Anant Singh had won Mokama in 2005 and 2010 as a JD(U) candidate but quit the party prior to the 2015 assembly polls which he fought as an Independent and retained the constituency for the third consecutive term.
The controversial MLA has been, nowadays, accusing Nitish Kumar of having “used and discarded” him while calling Lalu as “the leader with the largest support base in Bihar”. Significantly, his severing of ties with the JD(U) was believed to have been triggered by his strong disapproval of the party’s tie-up with the RJD.
