Patna: Defending his ‘pichhlaggu’ (underling) barb at Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, poll strategist-politician Prashant Kishor said Wednesday he was upset with the JD(U) chief’s ‘surrender’ before the BJP just to cling to power without extracting any benefit for the state.
Facing flak for linking the BJP with (Nathuram) Godse, while having worked with the party in the past, Kishor asserted that public praise of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin by a mainstream political outfit was ‘a recent phenomenon, seen in the last six to eight months’.
Kishor said in the seven decades since Independence only fringe elements extolled Godse here and there.
“It has been only after the last Lok Sabha polls that we have seen workers of a mainstream party chanting slogans in his (Godse) praise, even a Member of Parliament doing the same on the floor of the House,” Kishor told a news channel here, referring to the incident involving Bhopal MP Sadhvi Pragya Thakur.
The expelled JD(U) vice-president lamented the pity was that, ‘those aligned with the BJP, did not muster the courage to even condemn the outrageous act’.
Bihar Deputy Chief Minister Sushil Kumar Modi had Tuesday taken a swipe at Kishor, saying the man who had cut his teeth as an election strategist for Narendra Modi in 2014, was now accusing the BJP of following ‘Godse’.
“As regards the controversy over picchlaggu remark, I have been expressing my reservations about people of Bihar accepting a leader who appears to be playing second fiddle (to the BJP). I might be wrong, but that is my view,” asserted the election strategist.
“However, I was ready to accept the surrender before the BJP had it been for extracting benefits for Bihar from the party in power at the Centre. If the capitulation is just to ensure continuance in power in the state, then it might be detested by the people,” he added.
PTI