NEW DELHI: Expelled RJD MP Pappu Yadav, whose party drew a blank in the Bihar polls, today termed the grand alliance's huge win as a victory of "casteist passion" touched off by RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat's quota remarks and lashed out at BJP for its "negative campaign".
He claimed that his one-month old Jan Adhikar Party lost badly because the social engineering brought about by Lalu-Nitish combine coupled with the RJD chief's "brazen" caste politics polarised voters. "It's a victory of casteist passion whipped up by Lalu Prasad after the RSS chief's comments. It's not a win of Nitish Kumar's so-called developmental agenda or the JD(U)'s tally would not have fallen to 71 from 115 (in 2010) and RJD's tally not gone up to 80 from 21," he told PTI here.
JD(U) and RJD had contested on 101 seats each with Congress fighting on the remaining 41 seats for the 243-member Bihar Assembly. Yadav's main target was the grand alliance during the campaign and it had accused him of having selected candidates to suit the interest of the NDA.
Taking a dig at BJP chief Amit Shah over his "firecrackers will go off in Pakistan if BJP loses" remark, he claimed, Bihar "cannot be communalised" because of its "entrenched caste system".
"Laluji stirred the casteist passion. BJP leaders decided to fall to his standards and lost," he said. He said his party will retain its independent identity and work as an opposition party.