NDA will emerge successful in 2019 LS polls : Nitish

Speed Post News Network

Patna : JD(U) National President and Bihar CM Nitish Kumar on February 5, 2018, said that the NDA will emerge successful in 2019 Lok Sabha polls. ” I am hopeful that the BJP-led alliance will emerge successful in the Lok Sabha poll in 2019,” Nitish said. He dismissed suggestions that the recent drubbing of the BJP in Rajasthan bypolls was a cause for alarm.

Nitish recalled how in Bihar, the JD(U)-BJP combine had fared badly in a bypoll prior to the 2009 parliamentary elections and scored massive victories in both the general elections in the state that year as well as the 2010 Bihar Assembly polls.

“We should be careful while evaluating a political situation through bypoll outcomes. In Bihar, the JD(U)-BJP combine had won 32 out of 40 seats in 2009 Lok Sabha polls. In Bihar Assembly polls in 2010, we won more than 200 seats in a House of 243. Though the bypoll held in Bihar prior to that had presented a different picture for us,” Nitish told reporters after his weekly “Lok Samvad” programme.
Nitish, who returned to the NDA fold last year, said he had predicted that BJP will retain Gujarat and it did happen though many scoffed at the prediction initially.

It may be mentioned here that the Congress recently wrested Alwar and Ajmer Lok Sabha seats and Mandalgarh Assembly seat from the BJP, a development many felt showed the ruling party was on a sticky wicket in Rajasthan ahead of the Assembly elections later this year.

Nitish, however, declined to comment on the reported rumblings in the NDA in Bihar where allies like RLSP chief and Union Minister Upendra Kushwaha and Hindustani Awam Morcha founder and former CM Jitan Ram Manjhi have been dropping hints about disgruntlement.” All people have the freedom to say and do whatever they wish. I do not like to react to such things,” the Bihar CM said

Kushwaha, Union Minister of State for Human Resource Development, had recently organized a human chain in support of educational reforms where leaders of the JD(U) and the BJP were absent though senior RJD leaders joined the event and attacked the NDA government in Bihar over deterioration in the education sector. Manjhi, on the other hand, recently demanded not less than 50 seats in the next assembly polls in Bihar.

“They were always together,” was Nitish’s reply when asked about former JD(U) Chief Sharad Yadav’s meeting RJD supremo Lalu Prasad at a jail in Ranchi where the latter is lodged following his conviction in fodder scam cases.