PC shall be responsible:Lalu.

RJD supremo Lalu Prasad and SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav on Wednesday warned the government that it would be solely responsible if anything untoward happens to them in the wake of reported plans to withdraw their NSG cover.

"If you say there is no threat to us, withdraw our security. But if anything happens to us be ready to face the consequences," Mr. Prasad told Home Minister P Chidambaram in the Lok Sabha during Zero Hour.

Mr. Yadav also spoke in similar vein recalling the murderous attacks on him including a knife attack during a Janata Durbar in which he had a miraculous escape.

"You are insulting those leaders who are engaged in the fight for social justice. You are putting our lives in danger by proclaiming that you are reducing our security," he said telling Mr. Chidambaram that the Home Ministry and the government would be responsible.

The issue was raised by Shailendra Kumar (SP), who said that instead of curtailing security of the two leaders, including Mr. Yadav, the protection should be increased.

Nirvan for Lalu?

Out of power, RJD chief Mr Lalu Prasad appears to have become an ardent follower of Lord Buddha. He is making intensive tours of the state, holding meetings with his party workers and asking them to "be wise", quoting Buddha’s preaching.
“Mahatma Buddha said, ‘Buddham sharnam gachchami…’. Do you know what it means? It means one should be wise and clever. One should never reveal one’s strategy before others,” Mr Prasad is quoted as having councelled repeatedly to his workers at recent party meetings.
The RJD chief is regularly addressing meetings of the party workers these days so as to revamp the party, instead of using his weekend free-time from the parliament to spend time with his family members. The Parliament, it is worth mentioning here, is currently in session, hardly sparing him two days in a week.
Mr Prasad is exhorting his party workers to stand up, take positions and get ready for the ‘final battle’ (referring to the Assembly elections due in October of next year). Further, he warns the workers of the “divide and rule” policy of the ruling regime and asks them not to fall into its trap. He is also using this platform to launch subtle campaigns against the Election Commission for using EVMs in the elections. “EVM dacoity karati hai (EVMs loot our precious votes),” he tells the workers, adding: “I personally saw evidence of this during a demonstration of faults that occur during voting through EVMs made by an NGO in Delhi recently”.
The speeches being made by Mr Prasad are repetitive these days, centering on three points ~ firstly, his open confession that his decision to ignore the Congress in the Lok Sabha polls had cost his party dear, secondly, criticism of chief minister Mr Nitish Kumar, and lastly, his allegation that the railway minister Miss Mamata Banerjee is not telling the truth with regard to the Railways’ surplus amount. Previously, he had preferred to make lighter speeches, often phrasing serious matters in a jovial manner, leaving the audience in peals of laughter.
So far, the RJD chief has held workers' meetings in districts such as East Champaran, Gaya, Purnia and Bhagalpur and he plans to cover all of Bihar in the next few weeks.
In the last few days, the ruling UPA government has done enough to make Mr Prasad angry. First, the government denied him a Cabinet berth, then the railway minister Miss Mamata Banerjee refuted his claim that the Railways earned profits of Rs 90,000 crore under his tenure and announced that she would bring out a White Paper on the financial position of the railways under him, and lastly, the government initiated a move to remove him from the front row seats in the Lok Sabha.
Of these 'injuries', most humiliating is Miss Banerjee’s declaration to publish a white paper on the financial health of the railways in his tenure, while rejecting his claims of railway profits of over Rs 90,000 crore which earned him international acclaim, heaping him with the sobriquet “management guru”. Yet, Mr Prasad has not reacted angrily, as had seemed to be his disposition in the past, but continues repeating the old line that he “welcomes” the decision. “Let the White Paper be presented in the House. My figures are correct. I have nothing to fear”, is all he says whenever prodded by reporters to give his reactions on Miss Banerjee’s announcements.
In fact, Mr Prasad, whose party has lent unconditional support to the ruling UPA at the Centre, has not been very vocal against the government and has only gone as far as softly blaming the Centre for not being serious enough about making public the reports of the Liberhan Commission.

Musical chair for Lalu.

Vanquished in the electoral arena of his home state Bihar, Lalu Prasad is jostling for space in the corridors of power here, while other leaders of his Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) regret having snapped ties with the Congress during the elections.

With the number of RJD MPs crashing from 24 in the 2004 elections to just four now, the former railway minister has lost his berth in the front benches of the Lok Sabha and has been forced to plead to the speaker to allot him a front-row seat.

But he knows his demand is unreasonable, and has resigned himself to his fate. “I will follow the speaker’s direction. There is no problem in asking questions even from the back rows of the house,” Lalu Prasad told reporters Friday.

The RJD has also lost its office in Parliament House — it has been allotted to the Bahujan Samaj Party. Lalu Prasad met Speaker Meira Kumar and pleaded with her not take away the office that is still plastered with photographs of him and his wife Rabri Devi.

As a cabinet minister in the last government, Lalu Prasad used to sit just behind Congress chief Sonia Gandhi in the previous Lok Sabha. Now his party’s MPs are yet to be allotted seats. They sit wherever there is space — mostly in the back benches.

“Baithne mein kya hain, jahan jagah khali milti hum baith jaate hain (What’s the big deal about sitting? We sit wherever there is space),” Raghuvansh Prasad Singh, former minister and Lalu Prasad’s close confidant, told IANS.

Sitting in the office which they might need to vacate, Raghuvansh-babu, as he is popularly known, said irritably: “Is it an issue whether we have office space or not?”

The party was okay with it, he quickly added.

“We didn’t get the numbers, so we don’t have front bench and so we may not have office. That is the difference between victory and defeat; one who is born also dies; it is simple.”

The usual norm in the Lok Sabha is to allot one front row seat to a party that has got 16 to 20 seats.

As rural development minister in the last government, Raghuvansh Prasad had won accolades for his hard work in implementation of the Congress’ vote winning National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. Today, he waxes nostalgic.

Asked why the NREGA for which he toiled so hard did not give the RJD electoral dividends in Bihar, he shrugged: “That is a fraud played out by (Bihar chief minister) Nitish Kumar. It is a central scheme which the state government has to implement. He didn’t do it properly.”

On the reasons for the party’s poor performance, Raghuvansh Prasad said: “There are 20 seats (in Bihar) where if you add the votes of the RJD and the Congress, it is more than that of the NDA (National Democratic Alliance, of which Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal-United is a constituent).”

So was it a mistake to have snapped ties with the Congress? “Wahi hua hain, wahi to hain (this is what has happened),” Raghuvansh Prasad grimaced. “With these 20 seats, we would have won.”

Lalu no more a veggie??

This might have come straight out of the fables. When RJD chief Mr Lalu Prasad Yadav was still in jail in connection with the fodder scam, he had a strange dream ~ he vowed before Lord Shiva to give up non-vegetarian food. This took place some eight years back when Mr Prasad was lodged in the Ranchi jail. Lord Shiva supposedly visited him in his dreams and asked him to give up non-vegetarian food as a condition to fulfill all his wishes and the result was startling. He managed to enjoy power for another five years, thanks to his wife Mrs Rabri Devi. Out of power now ~ first in his home state Bihar and now in New Delhi ~ the frustrated RJD chief has “broken” his old promise and is back to relishing non-vegetarian food with great vengeance. “A day back, I had fish and chicken but will have mutton very soon. I really loved them”, the RJD chief told reporters here yesterday saying he has already requested Lord Shiva to forgive him for breaking his promise. “It has been eight years since I quit non-veg and I was not very happy with my decision. Hence I begged forgiveness and told my baba: ‘Hey Baba, maaf karin; ab bardast naikhe hoit (please forgive me as this is beyond my control)’ ”, he said. He admitted he that pledged to quit non-vegetarian food while he was lodged in Ranchi jail in November 2001. It was during this time that Lord Shiva visited him in his dreams and told him: “Tum mans-machali khana chod do; sab thik ho jayega (things will be fine if you give up eating non-vegetarian food)”. “Right at that moment, I went to a Shiva temple located on the jail premises, surrendered before him and promised to follow his directive. A few days later, I was released on bail”, Mr Prasad said. The stories relating to his gastronomical desires do not end here. Sources close to the RJD chief said the latter is so fond of non-vegetarian food, that he nominated his “cook” Mr Ali Anwar who would prepare “kebab” for him, a Member of the Bihar Legislative Council (House of the Elders). For a long time, Mr Ali was known as kebab mantri. His aides and local officials still recall how Mr Prasad during his stint as the chief minister would carry goat meat and varieties of fishes on his helicopters while returning from functions held in the rural areas. His love for fish is gauged from the fact that he had even dug a big pond at his residence to keep the fishes of his choice.

Dont allow Homosexuality:Lalu.

Former Union minister and RJD chief Lalu Prasad on Saturday demanded that the central government move the Supreme Court against the Delhi High Court verdict “decriminalizing” homosexuality.

“We must not follow western culture. Sex between people of same gender is not at all acceptable,” he said. He said he would take up the matter in Parliament, asking the government to take a stand on Delhi High Court ruling. “The government must not make any amendments in Section 377 and rather challenge the ruling,” he said.

On the allegations challenging his turnaround claim during his tenure as the railway minister, Lalu said he was ready to face white paper truth but wanted Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar to apologise if facts and figures on railways profit during his tenure were found correct.

“I am not a bit worried about white paper and ready to get penalised but Nitish Kumar should be ready to seek apology from me after the report comes out,” he said.

Lalu now?

If it’s the Congress and Lalu Prasad, a seat-share problem can never be far away. This one has nothing to do with the next Bihar elections, though — the Congress isn’t even sure the old allies are going to team up in end-2010. The seat puzzle vexing the party is: where does the former railway minister sit in the Lok Sabha? Lalu Prasad boasts a weighty CV: veteran MP, former Union minister, former chief minister and regional satrap, never mind his diminished strength. By right and precedent, he gets a front-row seat, perhaps next to successor Mamata Banerjee who is threatening him with a white paper on his tenure. But what has queered his pitch is not only the ups and downs of coalition politics but also a rule framed by one of the House’s first Speakers. It decrees that parties with five MPs or less, as well as Independents, should sit on the back benches. The Rashtriya Janata Dal has just four members and so ought to be banished to the last or the penultimate of the 11 rows that seat the House’s 545 members. Yet the first row is where Lalu Prasad has always sat, whether in the Rajya Sabha or the Lok Sabha; it’s from this vantage position that his rustic accent has soared above opponents’ murmurs and malfunctioning microphones, and his sense of humour has brought laughter. “It’s a matter of his prestige. Someone as senior and eminent in public life surely deserves a place with the Prime Minister and Sonia Gandhi?” a former RJD member of Parliament said. Speaker Meira Kumar will have the last word on who sits where, but the Congress knows there’s not much time left before the seats have to be allocated. Of the front row’s 19 seats, the UPA has a claim to 10. At the moment, Lalu Prasad is squeezed in a three-seater in the first row (all non-UPA seats) with his on-and-off friend Mulayam Singh Yadav and the CPM’s Basudeb Acharya. Mulayam is likely to keep his place because he leads a 23-member party. So too Acharya. But the Bahujan Samaj Party, which has 20 MPs, is a claimant to the non-UPA seat Lalu sits in. So, if he has to be at the front, the seat has to come from the UPA quota. The Congress has already decided on the first six seats in keeping with convention: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Pranab Mukherjee (leader of the Lok Sabha), Sonia Gandhi, Sharad Pawar, P. Chidambaram and Mamata (she replaces Lalu Prasad). That leaves four. Lalu Prasad may look with hope at a couple of past precedents. In 1991, the P.V. Narasimha Rao-led Congress government requested the Speaker to give a front seat to former Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar although he had less than five MPs. Shekhar occupied the allotted seat even when he was the lone Lok Sabha MP from the Samajwadi Janata Party. So, too, when former Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda made it to the Lok Sabha in 2004 with four MPs, he was seated next to Shekhar. Deve Gowda will have to be given a front-row seat this time too. That leaves three. A Congress minister said that although ally DMK was eligible by strength of numbers, none from the party had the seniority to merit the front-row “honour”. “So, we may consider giving one to Lalu Prasad,” the minister said non-committally. Another Congress source was more cautious. “How will Mamata react? We may have to think about it,” the source said. “Second, what will the Bihar Congress people say? Given the way their brains tick, they will wonder if a re-alliance is on the cards… and knowing Lalu, he will make a meal of such a gesture.”