New Delhi: Bihar agriculture minister Sudhakar Singh, a Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader who has often embarrassed the government by raising allegations of corruption in his own department resigned on Sunday from the state cabinet.
Singh’s resignation was “accepted and forwarded to governor Phagu Chauhan”, according to a statement issued by the Chief Minister’s Office. Singh is the second minister to resign since Nitish Kumar exited the NDA and joined hands with the RJD and other parties to form a ‘Mahagathbandhan’ government.
His portfolio was allocated to fellow RJD MLA Kumar Sarvajeet, who was till now the minister for tourism. Deputy chief minister Tejashwi Yadav has been given the additional charge of tourism, the statement said.
The induction of Singh, a first-term MLA from Ramgarh in Kaimur district, into the Nitish Kumar ministry less than two months ago was mired in controversy. He has been in his constituency for the past two days and according to RJD sources he made the move after a telephone call from Tejashwi Yadav the previous night.
Yadav is said to have conveyed his displeasure over Singh’s behaviour, which was deemed to be in violation of the principle of “collective responsibility” of the cabinet. Singh sent his resignation afterwards.
Singh did not turn up in Patna but dispatched his resignation letter through a personal staffer who handed it over to his father Jagadanand Singh, the RJD state unit chief.
Jagdanand Singh handed over the resignation letter to Yadav.
Later, the septuagenarian RJD leader issued a statement to the media claiming that his son was fighting for the cause of farmers like Mahatma Gandhi and Lal Bahadur Shastri, whose birth anniversaries fell on the day.
“However, the decision to tender the resignation was taken because we did not want the rift to widen,” said Jagdanand Singh, whose loyalty towards Yadav and RJD supremo Lalu Prasad has earned him a second consecutive term as the state party chief.
The BJP, which has been licking its wounds since Kumar’s exit from the NDA in August, claimed that the development indicated that the seven-party ruling ‘Mahagathbandhan’ has turned “wobbly”.
“The government has not completed two months and its second wicket has fallen. At this rate, it is anybody’s guess how long this coalition is going to last,” said senior BJP leader and former deputy chief minister Sushil Kumar Modi.
The allusion was to the fact that Singh’s resignation came about a month after another RJD minister, Kartik Kumar, put in his papers. Kumar had resigned in protest against being divested of the law portfolio because of his alleged involvement in a kidnapping case. The allocation of the key department to him despite such a record had triggered huge controversy in the state.
Incidentally, Singh’s induction had also been a matter of controversy as the BJP pointed out an old case relating to a rice mill he owned defaulting on payment.
Interestingly, Singh had begun his political career with BJP and had unsuccessfully contested the 2010 assembly polls on the party’s ticket.
Soon after becoming the agriculture minister, Singh, who is an alumnus of the prestigious Kirori Mal College, Delhi, set about an image-building exercise, refusing to accept the ministerial bungalow but ended up making headlines for all the wrong reasons.
Last month, he told a gathering in his constituency that his department was infested with “thieves” and as its head, he felt like a “choron kaa sardaar” who worked under bigger thieves.
This was said to have led to a showdown between the minister and the chief minister at a meeting of the cabinet.
Recently, Singh was again in news for having told a public meeting that corrupt officials deserved to be “beaten with shoes”.
He had also trashed the policies that have been in place in Bihar for long, questioning the abolition of the Agricultural Produce Market Committee Act and the three “agriculture road maps” that Kumar has brought out during his tenure.
“The decision to scrap them [the mandis] was anti-farmer,” Singh said. “Someone needs to stand up for the farmers and the injustice being done to them. Scrapping the APMC Act has destroyed the farmers,” his father said.
Speaking to The Hindu recently, the younger Singh said that while parties are in the opposition, they “keep raising people’s issues” but once they become part of the government, they get “disconnected with the same people and the issues”.
“Being an Agriculture Minister of the State, can someone tell me why I should not flag issues of farmers’ grievances? And that too, when 80% of our State’s population is dependent on agriculture,” he asked.
(With PTI inputs)