Why are senior Union ministers making a beeline to Bihar?

Patna,(BiharTimes): There is sudden rise in the number of visits to Bihar by senior Union ministers belonging to the Congress party.

While External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid and Finance Minister, P Chidambaram, visited Nalanda University to see its construction work, Union Home Minister, Sushil Kumar Shinde, on Tuesday laid the foundation stone of an SSB recruitment training centre and flagged off work on a 552-km long India-Nepal border road.

Political observers are of the view that the actual reason of the visits is that these leaders want to spend more and more time with the Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar for obvious political reason. In fact this is the first visit by top minister in Manmohan cabinet after the JD(U) split with BJP on June 16.

Analysts are of the view that there is nothing much for Salman Khurshid and P Chidambaram to look in Nalanda. “External Affairs and Finance Ministers use to have very tight schedule and can not afford to spare one full day to see just the boundary wall of Nalanda University, where the construction work has not gathered full momentum,” said one of them.

They both came with political mission. The constitution of a six-member Committee to look into the demand of special status for Bihar was the outcome of the visit by the Union Finance Minister.

When he was here some few weeks back Nitish showed extra-ordinary generosity and went to the Sadaquat Ashram, the state headquarters of the Congress party to drop him. This was something strange and never expected from Nitish Kumar, who is too much conscious about protocol.

In the Budget speech last February Chidambaram called for revisiting the criteria for the special category status. The Bihar chief minister then publicly appreciated the speech while the then deputy Sushil Kumar Modi strongly criticized it.

The June 25 visit of Shinde is another big step to bring Congress and JD(U) cloer. Ironically, it was on this very date in 1975 that Emergency was imposed and Nitish was among those thousands of political opponents, who had to either go to jail or suffer in a different way.

Ever since then Nitish used to lambast Congress on this day, but today he was literally rubbing shoulder with the Home Minister. It was the same Shinde whom Nitish, while joining hands with BJP, strongly criticized when he said that RSS is training Hindu terrorists in the country. 

On Tuesday Nitish was at the airport to receive him though the CM was not present beside Shinde when the latter was talking to the media. The Home Minister showered ‘secular’ praise on the Bihar chief minister and called him a ‘good human’ being. 

The Bihar chief minister accompanied the Home Minister to Supaul and spent several hours with him.