Why Nitish Kumar felt the absence of Sushil Modi, ‘Jaitley channel’ | Political Pulse News,The Indian Express
After taking oath as the Bihar CM for a record eighth time Wednesday, JD(U) supremo Nitish Kumar said that if BJP leader Sushil Kumar Modi had been his deputy CM the situation leading to his snapping ties with the BJP would not have arisen.
After forming the Mahagathbandhan (Grand Alliance) government and taking oath as the Bihar Chief Minister for a record eighth time Wednesday, a day after he walked out of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) again, Janata Dal (United) supremo Nitish Kumar said that if BJP leader Sushil Kumar Modi had been his deputy CM the situation leading to his snapping ties with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would not have arisen.
The BJP, which was stunned by Nitish’s move, pushed Sushil,70, to the margins of the Bihar political scene despite the fact that the latter had enjoyed a warm and close relationship with the CM in their successive coalition governments as his deputy from November 2005 to June 2013 and again from July 2017 to December 2020.
Nitish also had a seamless communication line with former Union minister late Arun Jaitley. The Bihar BJP circles then used to dub it as Nitish’s “Jaitley channel”. Sushil was also known to be close to Jaitley. So, the relations between the two NDA allies had remained smooth at both the state and central levels.
However, their ties developed the first crack during the BJP National Executive meet held in Patna in 2010, when big advertisements were published in Bihar newspapers showing the then Gujarat CM and current Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Nitish Kumar in the same frame from a picture from a 2009 Haryana rally. Upset by the ads, Nitish cancelled the dinner he was going to host for the visiting BJP leaders.
Although the then ruling JD(U)-BJP alliance had survived but some hiccups remained that eventually reached a breaking point in June 2013. But even then, Nitish had kept Sushil and Jaitley posted about his reservations about Modi’s expected projection as the BJP-led NDA’s PM candidate for the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.
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