Patna, February 9, 2013- Peeved at his party men’s proclivity to repeatedly float his name for the Prime Minister’s post, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar on Friday said that the people presenting his name were not his well-wishers. “I feel sad about it,” he said. “The people suggesting my name (for the prime minister’s post) are certainly not my well-wishers.”
Reacting to some of his party men’s suggestion that he was the ideal candidate for the Prime Minister’s post, Nitish said he would not like to comment on such things.
“Yeh sab faltu baat hai (These are all absurd talks),” he said on the sidelines of a conference of chairmen of different state public service commissions in Patna, after his return from Bodh Gaya where he had gone to welcome Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa today.
Nitish’s angry retort came in the wake of the latest statement by senior Janata Dal-United leader Hari Kishore Singh that the Bihar CM was the ideal prime ministerial candidate.
Singh, a former Union Minister of State for External Affairs, who is at present the deputy chairman of the state planning board, said that in his personal view Nitish would be the best candidate to head the government at the Centre.
Singh said he had recently met senior BJP leader L K Advani to demand that the prime ministerial candidate of the NDA not be declared before the elections, since that might benefit the Congress.
Kishore’s views were, however, dismissed by the JD-U as his personal views.
Party spokesman Neeraj Kumar said that the party had already made its position clear on the prime ministerial candidate. “It should be from the largest party in the NDA,” he said. “The candidate will be first decided by the BJP which will then be discussed at the NDA meeting.”
This is not the first time that Nitish has reacted angrily to party leaders’ attempts at propping him as the PM candidate.
Last year, he had made Bhim Singh, a minister in his cabinet, eat his words after he had strongly called for making Nitish the prime ministerial candidate of the NDA ahead of the 2014 polls.
Nitish has time and again cautioned his party leaders in the past not to float his name as the prime minister-in-waiting. He had even said that he did not consider himself to be worthy of the post. Still, several leaders of his party have not heeded his advice.
This has prompted the Opposition to allege that the entire episode is a charade and a well thought-out plan by the Janata Dal-United.
Rashtriya Janata Dal president Lalu Prasad Yadav has often said that Nitish secretly harboured the ambition of becoming the prime minister.
