RANCHI, May 2: The extension granted by the Rabri Devi government to the interim Jharkhand Area Autonomous Council on Tuesday night - the sixth since it was set up on August 9, 1995 - has kept alive the RJD-JMM alliance in Bihar. After they were routed in the Lok Sabha election in this region and their arch rivals formed the BJP-led coalition government at the Centre promising inter alia, creation of a separate Vananchal state, these two allies have become vulnerable to the covert moves by their dissident MLAs (JMM 5; RJD 4 or more).The demand for the dismissal of the Rabri Devi government raised among others by JD leader Ram Vilas Paswan, BJP leader Yashwant Sinha, Union Ministers George Fernandes and Nitish Kumar, together with the Congress General Secretary Sushil Kumar Shinde had sounded an alarm in the camps of these two allies.
This became all the more obvious on May 1 when JMM spokesperson Prabhakar Tirkey issued a press statement criticising, not Bhandari, but the RJD led government on thesubject. Though, the former move was prompted by largely erroneous reports in local dailies that claimed that JAAC was `dissolved' and that Governor Sunder Singh Bhandari had withheld his consent to the state government's ordinance seeking to provide six month extension to the interim council till its term ended on April 30 Now that the JAAC has gained life till August 9, a senior RJD leader said that ``that the support withdrawal by the JMM to our government is staved off, at least for now''.
The RJD minority government, which has a strength of 126 in the 324 member House, survives on the support of 16 JMM MLAs. These MLAs and their party leaders are susceptible to pulls and pressures from both BJP-Samata combine and the RJD. Many of them who had won the 1995 Assembly polls on the plank of a separate Jharkhand state, are now worried that they would have nowhere to go if the BJP-led coalition government succeeds in according statehood to this region where they had set up their party in 1972 to press foralmost an identical demand.
Conscious of its strength, the JMM leadership's gameplan is to extract maximum advantage from the ruling party for itself. A case to the point: Soren incurred an expenditure of Rs 16 lakh on the his official residence and Rs 1.12 lakh on residential telephone during the past three months, and Mandal's air travel bill comes to Rs 1.20 lakh. Most of these bills have been cleared by appropriate government officials. And yet they don't seem content. Transfer and posting, which has long been a lucrative enterprise here, is still a cause for the ongoing tussle between the RJD and JMM leaders.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
