Union home minister Amit Shah on Wednesday underlined Nitish Kumar’s current status as Bihar’s chief minister, adding that the post is “not vacant”, amid questions about who would be the CM if the NDA wins the election this time too.
Addressing a poll campaign rally in Samastipur, Shah attacked the opposition’s INDIA bloc or Mahagathbandhan, alleging that RJD supremo Lalu Prasad wants to make his son Tejashwi the chief minister of Bihar and Congress leader Sonia Gandhi wants to see her son, Rahul Gandhi, as the prime minister.
He asserted that “neither of the two posts is vacant”.
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“In Bihar, Nitish Kumar ji is the CM and in Delhi, Narendra Modi ji is on the Prime Minister post,” he added.
The home minister’s assertion, which came mostly in the present tense, comes a day after the opposition’s CM candidate, RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav, made a claim about the future — that the BJP “will not make Nitish Kumar the CM after the assembly election”.
“Nitish Kumar is like a puppet in NDA. The BJP is just using the face of Bihar CM Nitish Kumar. Amit Shah has already confirmed that Nitish Kumar will not become the CM of Bihar (when) he said that the MLAs will decide the CM for Bihar,” Yadav claimed.
Amit Shah has stressed that the choosing the CM is a set process in which MLAs decide. The BJP and JDU have said they are fighting the election “in Nitish Kumar’s leadership”, but a formal CM face announcement — like the one made by the INDIA bloc — has not come.
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“The INDIA alliance has declared me as the CM face, but the NDA has not done even a single press conference to declare who will be the CM face of the NDA,” Tejashwi added.
In the run-up to the 2025 elections, Bihar is witnessing the main contest between the National Democratic Alliance and the Mahagathbandhan.
The state will go to the polls in two phases on November 6 and November 11, with counting of votes to be held on November 14.
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