A key political aide of Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar on Friday drew Prime Minister Narendra Modi's attention towards accusations of corruption faced by many current and former leaders of the BJP.
JD(U) parliamentary board chief Upendra Kushwaha also coined a term -- "Bhrasht Jan Party" -- to rubbish Modi's allegation that parties opposed to the BJP had gathered together to "protect the corrupt".
Kushwaha, who had served in the Union council of ministers in Modi's first tenure, offered his take in a couple of tweets, sharing a video of the prime minister's abrasive speech in Kerala on the previous day when the latter had spoken of "a new type of polarisation".
The JD(U) leader reeled out names of leaders as diverse as Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma and Narayan Rane, both of whom joined the BJP after previous stints with the Congress, Mukul Roy, who is back in Trinamool Congress after a brief innings in the saffron party, and BJP veterans such as former Karnataka CM B S Yeddyurappa besides the "Reddy brothers", one of whom had served in the southern state's cabinet.
Kushwaha also underscored the corruption scandals associated, respectively, with the leaders. He mentioned Mukul Roy having been an accused in Sarada chit fund scam in West Bengal, mining scam involving the Reddy brothers, corruption allegations against Yeddyurappa "who was made CM nonetheless", Rane's name in Adarsh housing society scam and a PWD corruption scandal in Assam for which the BJP had levelled accusations against Sarma.
"All these cases were placed on the backburner after the leaders got associated with the Bhrasht Jan Party," alleged Kushwaha.Modi had made the acerbic remark on Thursday, a day after the Patna tour of Telangana CM K Chandrasekhar Rao who met his Bihar counterpart and RJD supremo Lalu Prasad and gave the call for a "BJP-mukt Bharat".