Lalu's tonga to counter BJP rath

 It was he who had halted BJP patriarch Lal Krishna Advani’s Rath (chariot) in Samastipur as the chief minister of Bihar and got him arrested in 1990, when the Hindutva movement was at its peek.

Twenty-five years later, the same Lalu Prasad, supremo of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) has hatched a fresh plan to counter the saffron party in the state ahead of the prestigious Assembly polls scheduled later this year.

A day after the BJP flagged off 160 raths as part of its campaign for the election, Prasad said that he would tour the state in a tonga (a light horse-drawn carriage) to counter what he termed a false propaganda.

The rustic Lalu, known to read the pulse of the voters well, said that like Lord Krishna, he has to steer the rath of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar to victory. The friends-turned-foes turned friends again in recent times to counter the BJP led by Narendra Modi.

“The BJP’s rath, like its party, is nakli (fake) as it is fitted with all the hi-tech gadgets in commercial vehicles. My rath will be the original one - a tonga. We (the RJD) will hire 1,000 tongas, which will visit each and every block and expose BJP’s false
propaganda through which the saffron camp won the last Lok Sabha election,” the
former Bihar chief minister said while addressing a meet here.

The move comes close on the heels of Nitish’s JD(U) launching ‘Har ghar dastak’ (knock every door) campaign and BJP’s ‘Sau din’ (100 days) campaign in which the party intends to hold 1 lakh public meetings in the next hundred days.

Though Lalu Prasad is himself barred from contesting polls for the next six years from the day of his conviction in the fodder scam in October 2013, three of his children are likely to contest the polls.