'Indian' vs 'Caste': Poster war begins between BJP and Congress in Patna

BJP leaders were all Indians have suddenly appeared across Patna, days after Congress party workers put up posters mentioning the caste and community of their leaders

Posters saying Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders were all Indians have suddenly appeared across Patna, days after Congress party workers put up posters mentioning the caste and community of important leaders, including national president Rahul Gandhi and Bihar unit president Madan Mohan Jha. The BJP posters depict Prime Minister Narendra Modi, party president Amit Shah, home minister Rajnath Singh and Deputy Chief Minister of Bihar Sushil Kumar Modi, among others. The senior leadership of Bihar Congress has, however, washed its hands of the episode. The posters had been put up by “some over-enthusiastic workers” and not by the Bihar Pradesh Congress Committee, said senior leaders.

Directly proportional

The bloodbath on Dalal Street over the past few weeks has had an interesting impact on an entirely unrelated activity. An analysis of Google Trends data shows search for the word ‘multibagger’— a term used for a stock that has gone up manifold in value—peaked out in January. Since then, there has been a sharp drop in search queries with that word. January is also when the Sensex and the broader markets hit record highs. The small- and mid-caps, particularly, have seen significant erosion in value in the last eight months.  

A warning for Tejashwi

Rashtriya Janata Dal founder and former Chief Minister of Bihar Lalu Prasad  is a worried man. Since the time he was sentenced in December to five years in jail for corruption during his term in the 1990s, relations between his two former-minister sons and daughter and Rajya Sabha MP Misha Bharti have been downhill. In hospital in Ranchi where he is being treated for heart and other conditions, Lalu called his younger son Tejashwi over the weekend to brief him about how to manage party affairs as well as his older siblings. The 29-year-old — who is also the party showrunner in the absence of his father — was purportedly given a stern warning against washing the dirty family linen in public as it might drain party resources at a time when it needs to get its act together for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.