Patna: Disgruntled Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) parliamentarian Shatrughan Sinha is lobbying hard to get a ticket for his wife, Poonam Sinha, also a film actress, in the upcoming Bihar assembly elections, sources said on Monday.
Sinha, a prominent face of the BJP in Bihar and former federal minister in the AB Vajpayee government, has, of late, been annoyed with the party for allegedly denying him a berth at the centre in the Narendra Modi government.
Reports said Sinha, who represents the Patna Sahib seat in Lok Sabha, wants to field his wife from Bankipur or Kumhrar, both of which have a significant number of Kayashtha voters. A former Miss Young India, Poonam has acted about a dozen Bollywood movies. She was also cast with her husband in a movie called Sabak. This, however, will be her maiden entry into politics if she decides to contest elections.
Observers say this could be part of Sinha’s strategy to exert pressure on his parent party ahead of polls as someone who was elected as a BJP Member of Parliament, but campaigns for his wife along with a rival party does not represent the organisation, which groomed him in politics, well.
Perhaps Sinha got apprehensive that the BJP was slowly trying to sideline him within the organisation, and hence he is desperate to get a ticket for his wife to retain his hold over Bihar politics through his friends in the Janata Dal United (JD-U), sources said. The way he has gone on, hugely eulogising Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) president Lalu Prasad Yadav, and sharing dais with them in public speaks volumes of his desperation.
Although there is no official confirmation about Sinha’s wife contesting on the JD-U ticket, the BJP parliamentarian has met Kumar twice in the past week, indicating his growing proximity with the ruling JD-U leadership.
“There has not come any official proposal [regarding Sinha’s wife joining the JD-U] so far, but if it comes we will happily welcome it. Who won’t, after all, honour this proposal?” asked JD-U’s general-secretary KC Tyagi, adding “Politics is a game of possibilities”.
State JD-U president Vashist Narayan Singh also said his party would get a boost if Sinha’s wife joined the organsition, while chief minister Kumar termed Sinha the “pride of Bihar”. “I have personal relations with him [Sinha]. It does not matter [if] he works for a rival party,” Kumar told the media.
Sinha’s closeness to the leaders of the Grand Secular Alliance has not gone down well within BJP. The party is also not happy with Sinha after it learnt he was one of the signatories on the execution stay petition of 1993 Mumbai blast convict Yakub Menon, who was hanged last week. “Shatrughan Sinha has embarrassed the party by signing a petition to the President against the execution of Yakub Memon. This is not the party line,” federal finance minister Arun Jaitely was quoted as saying in the local media.
Sinha, however, today denied having signing such petition through a series of tweets. “To my friends in the party who have spoken about my having signed the mercy petition, I would suggest that next time please verify your facts before sharing your “deep embarrassment” in public. These reactions are only aimed at pulling each other down and send wrong messages to our detractors,” Sinha tweeted.
Meanwhile, Modi has declared war on JD-U and its leader Kumar for breaking a long-standing alliance with the BJP and joining hands with the RJD, which is widely blamed for establishing “Jungle Rule” in Bihar. At a recent rally in Bihar, in July end, Modi launched the bitterest attacks on Kumar, questioning the latter’s DNA for frequently “back-stabbing” his political friends — from Yadav to Jitan Ram Manjhi and finally the BJP.
