The recently concluded Bihar Assembly polls saw a new twist on Wednesday as former deputy Chief Minister Sushil Kumar Modi accused RJD president Lalu Prasad Yadav of attempting to poach NDA MLAs. Taking to Twitter the BJP leader alleged that despite being in jail, Yadav was attempting to topple the recently formed government in the state. He shared an audio clip to back up his claims.
For the uninitiated, the NDA had secured an absolute majority with 125 seats in the 243 seat Bihar Assembly. The Mahagatbandhan consisting of the RJD, Congress and Left parties had manages to secure 110 seats, even as the RJD bagged 75 seats and the highest percentage of the vote share.
In a tweet on Tuesday night, Modi had shared a phone number and claimed that Yadav was calling up NDA MLAs and offering them ministerial berths in exchange for defecting and shared the purported number from which the RJD supremo was calling.
"Lalu Yadav making telephone call from Ranchi to NDA MLAs and promising ministerial berths. When I telephoned, Lalu directly picked up. I said don’t do these dirty tricks from jail, you will not succeed," he tweeted.
In a follow-up post shared on Wednesday morning, Modi shared an audio clip where Lalu Prasad Yadav is purportedly making the MLA an offer.
"Lalu Prasad Yadav luring the NDA MLA to vote in favor of the Grand Alliance in the election for the Bihar Legislative Assembly Speaker," he tweeted.
The RJD supremo is in Ranchi, where he has been sentenced by a special CBI court in a number of fodder scam cases. Initially lodged at the Hotwar Central Jail, he was moved to the RIMS hospital in the Jharkhand capital on medical grounds.
For the last few months, he has been putting up at the bungalow allotted to the Director of RIMS, which is seen as a favour extended to the ageing and ailing leader by the sympathetic Hemant Soren government in which the RJD is a partner.
Modi, who has been replaced as Deputy Chief Minister but made the Chairman of Ethics Committee of the state legislative council, in what is seen as a goodwill gesture by the Bihar Chief Minister, is known to be a strident critic of the RJD supremo. He was one of the petitioners on whose PIL the Patna High Court had ordered, in the 1990s, handing over of the fodder scam to the CBI.
(With inputs from agencies)
