JD (U) chief Nitish Kumar and RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav, who have forged an electoral alliance, along with the Congress, to take on the BJP in the by-elections to 10 seats in the Bihar Assembly scheduled for August 21, shared a platform on Monday after a gap of 20 years at an election rally in Vaishali district.
The impact of the new alliance in the by-elections would be watched keenly as it is the first opportunity to gauge the public mood after the May general elections. The BJP bagged its highest tally of 31 out of the 40 Lok Sabha seats in Bihar.
Mr. Kumar and Mr. Prasad, comrade-in-hands during the JP moment in the 70s and part of the first JD government in Bihar in 1990, parted ways in 1994 following personal differences.
At the rally, Mr. Prasad maintained that if the vote percentage of the RJD, the JD(U) and the Congress are taken together, it would come to 45 per cent, which is much more than that of the BJP which got over 29 per cent vote in Bihar in the Lok Sabha poll.
“We have joined hands not for the sake of power but to save the country from communal forces,” Mr. Kumar told the gathering. Mr. Prasad said they had come together for the sake of social justice threatened by the BJP, which came to power by “feeding false promises to the people.”
Attacking Prime Minister Narendra Modi without naming him, Mr. Kumar asked,” Where is acheche din [good days] promised to people, particularly the youth?”
