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Rabri affair gets Paswan in trouble

As the Opposition waits for President K R Narayanan's decision on Bihar, senior Janata Dal leader and former railway minister Ram Vilas Paswan appears to be the major loser in the matter.

Paswan had met Narayanan at the Rashtrapati Bhavan and urged him to accept the Union Cabinet's recommendation to clamp central rule in Bihar. The action has brought to fore the deep difference between JD leaders on the crisis.

Paswan criticised his party colleagues, including former prime minister Inder Kumar Gujral, for pleading with the President not to dismiss the Rabri Devi government. He contended that his colleagues defending the chief minister simply did not know the ground situation in the Bihar, where, he claimed, the law and order machinery had comprehensively broken down.

The JD leader's disenchantment with the Rabri Devi government is understandable. His erstwhile friend, now an inveterate enemy, Rashtriya Janata Dal chief Laloo Prasad Yadav, has made life difficult for him. In the last parliamentary election, Laloo Yadav's party bagged 16 seats, proving his detractors like Paswan wrong in their claim that he (Laloo Yadav) had lost his clout in Bihar.

The RJD had unleashed its might against Paswan in the Hajipur constituency, where the former railway minister won only because of the help of George Fernandes and his Samata Party.

No wonder, then, that Paswan has a powerful grudge against the Yadavs.

Whatever the President's decision, Paswan has been mauled politically while his colleagues, like Gujaral, seem to have gained mileage by coming out in the Bihar government's support.

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