Now, Congress MLA’s nephew shot dead in Bihar

Three days after Leader of the Opposition in the State Assembly, Tejashwi Yadav, quoted the National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) to buttress his point that there has been a 101.02 per cent increase in crime in Bihar, armed assailants gunned down a Congress MLA Santosh Mishra’s nephew Sanjeev Mishra.

The incident took place on Saturday evening at Sasaram when Sanjeev was coming out of his house to buy some medicines from a nearby shop. The marauders shot him from close range. One of the bullets hit Sanjeev on his head.

He was rushed to Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh (which is closer to Sasaram than the state capital Patna) for better treatment, but the MLA’s nephew succumbed to injuries on the way.

Sanjeev had extensively campaigned for his uncle Santosh Mishra who was one of the few Congress leaders to triumph in the November 2020 Assembly elections. “Sanjeev had plans to contest the ensuing panchayat polls in Bihar and he had been extensively moving around in the area,” informed a family source here on Sunday.

“The killing reflects how poor the law and order situation is in Bihar. If the relative of a legislator is not safe in the state, then imagine the plight of a common man. Crime, of late, has increased manifold. However, the government is busy passing the buck,” said the Congress MLA, Santosh Mishra, whose father GN Mishra was a minister in the previous Congress regime.

Meanwhile, Rohtas SP, Ashish Bharti, is personally monitoring the situation and has deployed adequate police force in the area to avert any backlash.

In the meantime, the Nitish regime Sunday appointed Chaitanya Prasad as the Principal Secretary, Home, in place of Amir Subhani, who was elevated as Development Commissioner.