BJP not serious about Ram temple, they treat Ram like a party member: Nitish Kumar

With the confidence of a man who’s beaten a prime minister-led campaign to win the top job in Bihar, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar said BJP is not serious about constructing the Ram Temple in Ayodhya. His comments come barely 24 hours after RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat on Wednesday said he hopes the construction of the Ram temple be completed in his lifetime. [caption id=“attachment_2531958” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar/ PTI[/caption] “The grand goal may be realised in our own time. May be we can see it with our own eyes,” Bhagwat said in Kolkata. “None can say when and how the temple will be constructed, but we need to be prepared and ready,” Bhagwat said. Nitish Kumar said the BJP is keeping the temple issue warm for purely political reasons and the reality is that only a court verdict and consensus between two communities can pave the road to construction. “They will talk of constructing the Ram Temple at the same site, but will not give dates. The BJP has only been trying to keep the issue alive”, Nitish said without naming Mohan Bhagwat. BJP does not have “genuine respect for Ram”, Nitish Kumar told reporters in Patna. “They just want to exploit people’s feelings for Ram. The party has hardly made efforts to sort out the (temple) issue, but uses it for political reasons at intervals”, said the Bihar CM. Kumar said the BJP has been treating Ram as if he were a “party member”. The CM also said efforts are on to change the JD(U)’s symbol from arrow to ‘Chakra’ (wheel), as the party lost many seats because voters confused its symbol with that of other parties. Many JD(U) leaders had complained that candidates of JMM and Shiv Sena, having the bow and arrow as their symbol, got JD(U) votes in the recent Bihar elections, reports The Indian Express. To Narendra Modi, the man who was not at Nitish Kumar’s swearing in, the message from Patna is loud and clear - the anti-BJP movement is gaining steam. After Modi’s historic mandate in 2014, ‘his’ Bihar election loss has exposed BJPs feet of clay. National Conference leader Farooq Abdullah — a veteran of Opposition unity efforts over the past three decades has recently said “Nitish ji ko ab tayyiari karni chahiye Dilli aane ki aur agla Pradhanmantri banne ki,” (Nitishji should now get ready to move to Delhi as the next Prime Minister). The next general election is in 2019. But before that come a string of state elections. West Bengal, Assam, Tamil Nadu, Pondicherry and Kerala will all go the polls in mid-2016 and Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and Goa in the first half of 2017. The anti BJP bloc is well and truly taking shape and Nitish Kumar is checking off some boxes on the to-do list as a warm up routine. First up: prohibition from April next year, then Rs 5 crore to Jayalalithaa for flood relief, and now, taking on the RSS.