Cornered by an dissenter faction led by his uncle in the Lok Janshakti Party, Chirag Paswan on Wednesday denied to lie low and delegated his right-hand man Raju Tiwari as the party’s Bihar unit president in the midst of a back-and-forth in the LJP for control.
The post was initially held by Chirag Paswan’s cousin Prince Raj, one of the five MPs who revolted on Monday under the administration of Pashupati Kumar Paras and asked the Lok Sabha Speaker remember them as a different team.
Confronting dissent, Paswan affirmed he was illegally taken out as the party president and was prepared to face a legal conflict over it. “If Pashupati Paras wanted to be the leader of the party in Parliament, he could have told me and I would have happily made him the leader. The way I was removed was completely illegal. We are also ready for a legal battle,” he said.
Claiming that JDU was behind the division, Paswan, MP from Jamui, said, “JDU as a party has always tried to divide other parties that come up to give them a fight. We are devising a legal way to respond to everything that has happened in the past few days. JDU is solely responsible for the current situation.”
Asserting that he has been deceived, Paswan said, “I have not been keeping well for the past few days. I am still recovering from typhoid… What hurts me the most is the fact that when I was on bed rest, such a strategy was made behind my back.”
“I tried my level best to make sure that the party and family stays united. Even my mother tried to contact uncle but was not able to do so,” said Pawan.
In the mean time, Paras hit back at Paswan saying, “You must ask Chirag Paswan why he removed me from the state president’s post. He did it even when he doesn’t hold power. We contested Bihar elections under my supervision and all 6 MPs won. We received the highest percentage of vote as per election commission’s report.”
On his first visit to Bihar since the emotional new development that saw him driving the dissent by everything except one of six LJP MPs, Paras likewise declared that Chirag had been “divested of” the post of national president on the earlier day “in keeping with the party constitution”.
“The party constitution stipulates that one person can hold only one post. Chirag, however, was the national president, the chairman of the parliamentary board and the leader in the House, all rolled into one. We have corrected that”, said Paras. He likewise said that while Suraj Bhan Singh, a previous MP, has been made the “working president” and a full-time national president of the LJP will be chosen here on Thursday.
Curiously, the two teams of the LJP have so far swore devotion towards the BJP-led NDA however neither the saffron party nor the JD(U) of Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar accused by Chirag’s allies for the conflict have spoken on the issue. State BJP president Sanjay Jaiswal excused the unrest inside the LJP as an “inner matter” of the party.
