After its revival in Uttar Pradesh, the Congress is hoping that Rahul Gandhi’s “right medicine” will help resuscitate the party in poll-bound Bihar, where it has been out of power for the last two decades.
“We were ill there (Bihar). We got a good doctor, who gave us the right medicine. There is a change of mindset in Bihar after Rahul Gandhi’s visit there. We will reach our destination under his leadership,” Minority Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid said here.
He was asked whether the party has any hope of revial in Bihar, where it currently has only 10 MLAs in the 234-member assembly. The party won two out of the 40 Lok Sabha seats in general elections last year.
Mr. Khurshid, who had been to Bihar recently, said, “there is excitement among the party workers as the party has decided to fight on its own and there is a readiness for change among people.”
Congress, which had parted ways with Lalu Prasad’s RJD and Lok Janshakti Party of Ram Vilas Paswan in the 2009 Lok Sabha election, has decided to contest the assembly elections on its own.
Mr. Khurshid said the party workers are especially enthused as the Congress will fight on a large number of seats this time compared to earlier when it was contesting only a few seats under an alliance.
“Like Uttar Pradesh, where we had got 22 seats in the last Lok Sabha election, our performance will go up in Bihar.
We will be benefitted from the people’s yearning for a change there,” Mr. Khurshid said.
The minister also expressed confidence that minorities will vote for Congress in large numbers in Bihar “as they have done in Uttar Pradesh owing to a number of steps taken by the central government for their uplift”. “We implemented Sachar committee report for the uplift of Muslims. Our party is also moving towards giving reservation benefits to backwards among Muslims,” Mr. Khurshid said.
The minister said the recruitment of minorities in government jobs has risen to 9.5 percent during UPA rule. “And if we committed a mistake anytime in the past, we readily apologised for it,” he said.
Rubbishing the charge of ruling JD(U) in Bihar that it has treated Muslims as a vote bank, Mr. Khurshid said, “We never treated any community as vote bank. We do not believe in such short term politics.
“A political party, which is 125 years old, cannot do it. Those parties, whose existence dates back to only 10 to 15 years, can, however, do it. They should ask themselves, why Muslims deserted them,” he added.
Asked about Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s criticism that the union ministers were “unnecessarily” attacking his government on implementation of central schemes, Mr. Khurshid said, “We are saying do not celebrate for an inch of development. We are talking about reaching one mile.”
He said the situation has “improved a little bit” in Bihar but the pace of development has been very slow.
Asked about the state government’s contention that the Centre is not serious about minority welfare works in Bihar, Mr. Khurshid shot back, “What is the test of seriousness. Is it seriousness that we should not give money for schools, colleges and ITIs and only give money for madrassas.”
“Their (Bihar government’s) seriousness is that even if madrassa money is available with HRD, they will not take it from there. We have two schemes from HRD for madrassas and from our money we try to develop, schools, colleges, training institutes and ITIs. Are we more serious or they?” he asked.
