Jharkhand polls: Saryu Roy denied ticket by BJP due to ties with Nitish Kumar?

Jharkhand’s food and civil supplies minister Saryu Roy says he was only following the party line of having ‘zero tolerance’ to corruption. But whenever he raised corruption related issues, he exclaims, he was accused of engaging in anti-party activities.

He did not want to be the cause for sending a third chief minister to jail, he was often quoted as saying. Saryu Roy, one of the petitioners demanding a CBI inquiry into the fodder scam in Bihar in the nineties, was referring to Lalu Yadav and another former Jharkhand CM Madhu Koda. His third possible victim, he indicated, could be the present Jharkhand CM Raghubar Das.

And after the party leadership made it clear that he would not be fielded in the Assembly election beginning later this month, Roy declared on Sunday that he would contest as an independent from both the assembly seats in Jamshedpur, Jamshedpur (East) represented by the chief minister and Jamshedpur (West), which Roy has represented for the past 10 years.

Decision to deny Roy the party ticket was not entirely unexpected. He had not only criticised Das publicly, he also has not been attending cabinet meetings for the past eleven months. He had also filed cases in court against government decisions and was vocal about corruption in the state, which has been ‘ruled’ by the BJP for 14 years since it was formed by bifurcating Bihar 19 years ago.

His critics wondered whether it was ‘moral’ and ‘ethical’ for him to criticise the government of which he was a part. Why couldn’t he first resign and then campaigned against corruption, they asked. Roy’s supporters would respond by asking why he was not being sacked by the chief minister if he had indeed crossed the line.

He was not sacked from the cabinet because evidently the BJP didn’t want him to embarrass the government from outside and hoped that as minister he would have to exercise some restraint.

But while Roy is yet to quit the party or get expelled, he has declared that corruption issues he had raised was merely the tip of the iceberg. “I have just raised 5% of the corruption till now; the remaining 95% will now get exposed,” he said in Jamshedpur on Sunday.

Roy, who has RSS links and was known to be close to former RSS Pracharak Govindacharya, has friends across party lines. His ‘friendship’ with Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar is well known. What is less known is the role he had played in making Lalu Yadav the chief minister. He, Nitish Kumar and Lalu Yadav were on the same side in 1989-90. Roy is also known to be close to the West Bengal Finance Minister Amit Mitra.

Indeed, one of the reasons why BJP decided against giving him the party ticket is said to be his close relations with the Bihar chief minister. Amit Shah is said to have objected to one of the books written by Roy getting launched in 2017 by Nitish Kumar.

Has the BJP underestimated Roy’s nuisance value and his ability to spring a surprise? The answer should be available in the next few weeks.