All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen president Asaduddin Owaisi said the Congress and the Rashtriya Janata Dal were to be blamed for the collapse of the mahagathbandhan in Bihar. Said Owaisi to THE WEEK, “Nitish Kumar was always expected to do this. He was never secular in the first place. If so, why was he with the BJP for close to 18 years. The Congress said it knew of these developments since the past four months. What were they doing? Were their leaders busy playing video games? It is a collective failure of the so-called secular parties. They should not have trusted Nitish.”
Owaisi said PM Narendra Modi was getting more popular because of the blunders committed by the secular parties. “If this is how it goes, Modi will get even more popular. He will always try to capitalise. He is known to be like that,” said Owaisi.
The ruling coalition in Bihar fell apart after Nitish Kumar resigned as chief minister on July 26. He said his tenure as CM was no longer maintainable as Tejaswi Yadav, who was his deputy from the RJD, had refused to resign in spite of facing corruption charges.
On July 27, Nitish took oath as chief minister for the sixth time, with the BJP giving him support. Senior BJP leader and the party’s face in Bihar, Sushil Modi, was sworn in as the deputy chief minister. This is the second time that Nitish and the JD(U) have got into an alliance with the BJP. The BJP-led NDA, of which Nitish was a part of, had ruled Bihar from 2005 to 2013. Nitish broke his alliance with the BJP in June 2013 after the BJP appointed Narendra Modi as the chief of election campaign for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.
In the Bihar assembly, Nitish's JD(U) has 71 seats, the RJD has 80 seats and the BJP has 53 seats. With the BJP and the JD(U) coming together, the coalition would have a majority in the assembly.
It is wrong to blame us for everything, said the Congress's national general secretary, K.C. Venugopal, to THE WEEK, “Everything was pre-planned. We tried our level best to save the alliance. Now, I am sure all the secular parties will remain together and unitedly fight the Modi-led BJP government at the Centre.”
