Nitish camp reminds Sharad their political roots were in non-Congressism

New Delhi, Aug 14 : As daggers are out in the JD(U) between the Nitish Kumar and the Sharad Yadav camps, the former has sought to pin down the ‘’rebel’’ leader by reminding him that the very political raison d’etre of their party was based on non-Congressism. JD(U) General Secretary KC Tyagi said here that Mr Yadav was today lamenting Mr Kumar’s break from the grand alliance, and was pinning all hopes on a Congress-led Opposition as a panacea for all evils but he should not forget that he himself was the product of a movement that was born out of non-Congressism. "How can any of us forget the 1948 conclave of Congress leaders in which Dr Ram Manohar Lohia, Jai Prakash Narayan, Dr Acharya Narendra Dev, Acharya Kriplani, Yusuf Mehr Ali, SM Joshi, Madhu Limaye participated and founded the Socialist Party dissatisfied with the way the Congress was behaving,’’ Mr Tyagi told . The party participated in the 1952 elections and got good number of votes, he said. Then in 1967 under the SVD banner, the Communists also joined in along with the then Jana Sangh in yet another attempt to give an alternative to the Congress, and in 1977 besides the Socialist, both the Communist Parties-- CPI(M) and CPI led by Harkishan Singh Surjit and Indrajit Gupta and many more dissident Congressmen again came together on the plank of non-Congressim. So what Mr Sharad was doing now was against the grain of the movement of which he claims to be a product, Mr Tyagi said. He ridiculed Mr Yadav’s concern for Secularism, saying that why Communalism was not an issue with him in 1999 when he joined the Atal-Bihari-led NDA Government. Mr Yadav was on Saturday removed from the leadership of the party in the Rajya Sabha. On August 19, Mr Nitish Kumar has called a meeting of the National Executive to take formal decision about joining the BJP-led NDA. Mr Yadav yesterday claimed that 14 state unit chiefs were with him, whereas the Nitish camp dismisses this claim, arguing that the party was only officially recognised in Bihar, so there was no question of any other body outside being legal party entity. UNI