M F AHMAD
Daltonganj, May 24: The Congress and the JMM here are at loggerheads, politically. Its leaders are engaged in a war of words.
It was the Congress that reacted first showing a mirror to its main ally, the JMM, to respect and honour the religion or code of the alliance.
Not lagging behind, the JMM retorted reminding the Congress here that there is no room for being politically panic-stricken but if the Congress believes in political noises, then it’s Congress’ choice and the JMM can’t help it.
It all started when the JMM had its district unit executive committee meeting wherein some party workers floated the name of the party leaders for contesting the 2024 assembly election, especially the Daltonganj seat and this alarmed the local Congress here so much so that its district president Jaish Ranjan Pathak alias Bittu Pathak issued a press note reminding the JMM to show a large and broad political accommodation, approach and attitude when it talks about contesting the coming assembly election.
JMM district president Rajinder Sinha talking to this correspondent today said, “Any deliberation of our internal meeting how much political or electoral it may be can’t be a subject to other parties even to our ally to express such feelings against us in public which the Congress did here most inappropriately and immaturely.”
The JMM leader said if the deliberations of our internal meeting had made the Congress so nervous then its leader ought to have spoken to him instead of creating an image in the public that the JMM in Palamu is politically and electorally overtaking or overriding the Congress.
On the other hand, Bittu Pathak told this correspondent that the JMM is behaving like a political master here where the political fact of the matter is that JMM, Congress and RJD are honourable allies and none of the three can ignore or overlook the past candidatures of the assembly election.
Pathak said any political reference in regard to who will contest from where in the 2024 assembly election at this juncture is no specimen of political maturity. “So, the JMM should avoid it since any electoral utterance may send a wrong signal or message to the electorates here,” he added.
Pathak was pretty sore over his not being duly invited recently to a programme of the chairman of the 20-point programme implementation committee held in the Pdt Deendayal Upadhyaya Smriti Bhavan for the launch of e-learning and e-game under the ECCE project for children in age group 3 to 6, as he told this correspondent that he was made to feel he and he and his party didn’t mean to the minister Joba Majhi’s programme.
Reacting to this allegation of Pathak the JMM district chief Sinha said, “First of all it was the administration’s event. Again, I had seen the name of the district president of the Congress before his chair. Where does the JMM come into the picture? His anger against us is misplaced.”
Sources said it is the BJP here which is most amused to see both the allies firing a salvo at each other as the BJP is to launch a house-to-house knock reminding 9 years of PM Narendra Modi’s achievements.
