Patna,(BiharTimes): Two journalists were killed within 24 hours in Jharkhand and Bihar giving enough ammunition to leaders of RJD and BJP to trade charge on each other.

First on Thursday night, Indradev Yadav, a local TV journalist, was shot dead by unidentified gunmen in Chatra––ironically a district known for ‘jungle’.

The assailants, who were on motor-cycles, fired five rounds of bullets killing the journalist on the spot.
Indradev was killed while he was returning home on his motor-cycle.

Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) chief Lalu Prasad, who was in Chatra on Friday to campaign for the Panki Assembly by-election, came down heavily on the Raghubar Das government for the killing of journalist and deteriorating law and order situation.

Lalu met the family members of the journalists and demanded immediate arrest of killers. He stongly attacked the BJP for propagating that there exists a Jungle Raj in Bihar.

But hours after he ended his diatribe against the BJP came the news of the killing of Rajdev Ranjan, bureau chief of Hindi daily, Hindustan in Siwan late on Friday evening.

This gave the BJP leaders an opportunity to scale up the attack on the Nitish government. They now started calling that “Maha Jungle Raj” prevails in Bihar.

Party spokesperson Shahnawaz Hussain said while the chief minister was visiting Varanasi, the people of the state were migrating out as criminals were ruling the roost. He described the killing of a journalist in Siwan as an attack on the fourth pillar of democracy.

Shahnawaz was not alone. All the top BJP leaders, including former deputy chief minister, Sushil Kumar Modi, made scathing attack on the state government as the killing in Siwan came six days after the brutal murder of Aditya Sachdeva, a 19-year old boy, at the hands of Rocky Yadav, son of JD(U) MLC, Manorama Devi.

Incidentally, they remained silent on Chatra killing.

The murder in Siwan, once the fiefdom of former MP, Shahabuddin, silenced the state government which got a breather of a sort following the killing of a journalist in Jharkhand. Grand Alliance politicians are always quick to site the examples of crime situation in Jharkhand, where too things are not very good.

The only difference is that the media do not highlight incidednts in Jharkhand as prominently as in Bihar.

This was clear this time too when Indradev’s murder got coverage in most television channels only after Rajdev’s killing in Siwan 24 hours later.