In yet another sign of growing friendliness between two old NDA partners, the BJP leaders attended the feast hosted by Chief Minister Nitish Kumar at his official residence in Patna on Monday night.
This was the first time in four years that the BJP leaders had visited the CM House and enjoyed the sumptuous dish in the company of the chief minister who in an abrupt move broke 17-year-old alliance with the BJP in June 2013.
Everyone was curious to know if the BJP people would honour the banquet request served to them by the chief minister.
The skepticism was only too natural given the fact that the chief minister had earlier cancelled the dinner hosted in honour of the BJP leaders who had come to Patna in June 2010 to attend party’s national executive body meeting and also returned Rs.5 crore cheque to the Gujarat government.
The chief minister who then was in power with the support of the BJP had reacted this way merely after the party inserted advertisements in local dailies republishing an old photograph which showed Kumar clasping hands with his arch-rival Narendra Modi, then chief minister of Gujarat.
Yet another reason of doubts about their presence of BJP people at the CM House was the June 2013 incident when the chief minister had severed long-standing alliance with his saffron partner shortly after Modi was declared the chairman of his party’s election campaign committee for the 2014 LS polls at Goa conclave.
Prior to that the CM had indirectly claimed to be the prime ministerial candidate and blamed the BJP for pushing senior party leaders such as AB Vajpayee and LK Advani to the background.
But, all the bitterness of the past appeared missing on Monday evening with the BJP people freely mixing with their old enemy and enjoying “tasty” food much to the amazement of the RJD legislators who too had been invited at the feast.
What was significant, Kumar himself welcomed the “BJP guests” and took every care of them.
The BJP people had visited the CM House four years after they were thrown out of power and all its 11 ministers ruthlessly dismissed by the government after the alliance break-up.
However, it was not all in the BJP who supported the party’s move to attend the feast. Bihar opposition leader Prem Kumar was one of them.
He boycotted the feast for alleged government’s crackdown on protesting teachers, home guard jawans and against steep rise in power tariff.
His predecessor Nand Kishore followed suit. But the party justified its decision saying the dinner was thrown not by a party but the chief minister of a state.
“This is not a party dinner by the one given by the chief minister of a state. In democratic set-up, posts of PM and CM are above politics,” was how the state BJP spokesperson Vinod Narayan Jha explained.
This was not the first time that the old partners looked to be coming closer. The JD-U has already greeted the BJP on its magnificent victory in UP and Uttarkhand Assembly polls, backed the BJP candidate Awadhesh Narayan Singh against its ally nominee in recent Council polls and has gone on supporting the demonetization drive of the Narendra Modi government even as both its allies, RJD and the Congress, have been strongly protesting on the streets.
The JD-U also backed the government’s move to order for surgical strike in PoK.