BJP ally Janata Dal United on Sunday said junior foreign minister M.J. Akbar should step down and let the charges of sexual harassment against him be examined, or else the government should sack him.

“I think it is for the gentleman to step aside and let the charges be examined,” Prashant Kishor, election strategist turned JDU politician, said during an interaction with journalist Barkha Dutt at IIT Delhi.

Pressed, Kishor said the Centre should sack Akbar if he failed to quit on his own.

“I still believe that he should take it (the decision) on his own. But if he doesn’t, should the government ask? I think it should ask,” Kishor said. “I think the party (JDU) would say the same thing.”

Kishor clarified that he hadn’t discussed the matter with his party boss Nitish Kumar and stressed that the JDU was too small an ally to force the government’s hand on Akbar.

His statement, however, is being seen as pressure from the ally on a day Akbar returned to the country from an official tour and dubbed the charges against him “false and fabricated”. He signalled no desire to resign, nor did the government seem keen to ask him to.

Kishor spoke about his past as an election strategist for Narendra Modi in 2014, Nitish in 2015 and the Congress last year in Uttar Pradesh and Punjab, and about his future in the JDU.

He felt that Modi continued to be the most popular leader in the country, despite a dip in his appeal from 2014, and was set to return to power in 2019.

Based on his experience working with them, he described Modi as a “risk-taker” and Rahul Gandhi as a “status quoist”. Kishor claimed that Rahul was focused on defeating the BJP, not on building the Congress.

He acknowledged that he had wanted Priyanka Gandhi to be projected as the chief ministerial candidate in Uttar Pradesh last year but the Congress had shot the idea down. Asked why, he said: “Ask them (the Congress).”

Kishor said he had no plans to become an MP and would focus on Bihar for the next 10 years to try and earn it a place among the country’s top 10 states.

Asked about Tejashwi Yadav’s relentless attacks on Nitish, Kishor desisted from criticising the young RJD leader. “We are not countering Tejashwi because we don’t want to engage in negative politics,” he said.

On Nitish dumping the secular alliance to return to the BJP’s arms, Kishor said the chief minister had done it in the interests of governance.

He said people outside Bihar might not like the about-turn but Nitish’s approval rating continued to be high in his home state. He said that many political leaders in the country had changed sides oftener than Nitish, and that the JDU leader was being unfairly targeted.

Kishor claimed that Nitish had tried his best to unite the anti-BJP forces before dumping the RJD. He said he had advised Nitish to speak out on why he had returned to the NDA. “I feel he should come out and tell (people) why he took the decision.”

Asked about the prohibition regime in force in Bihar, Kishor appeared uncomfortable. “I am not for draconian rules. He (Nitish) has been diluting it (the prohibition),” he said.

Kishor flagged a few positive aspects of prohibition, too, while acknowledging problems with implementation.