by Alok Mohit
PATNA: Bihar agriculture minister Sudhakar Singh, whose recent utterances had caused embarrassment to the Nitish Kumar-led Grand Alliance government, has resigned.
Confirming the development here on Sunday, his father and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) Bihar president, Jagdanand Singh, said Bihar agriculture minister had “submitted his resignation to the government.”.
Jagdanand Singh said Sudhakar Singh had been raising his voice in favour of farmers.
He said Sudhakar resigned because he was facing a lot of problems in fighting for the rights of farmers. “Someone needs to stand up for the farmers and the injustice being done to them. The agriculture minister took this up. Killing mandi law (Agriculture Produce Marketing Committee Act) has destroyed the farmers of state,” the Bihar RJD chief said.
Sudhakar Singh’s outspokenness over alleged corruption in his own department had made headlines recently.
Addressing a felicitation function after becoming a minister at Chand in Kaimur district, 212 km west of state capital Patna, Sudhakar Singh had flagged corruption in the lower bureaucracy, saying: “There is not a single wing of our (agriculture) dept that does not commit acts of theft. As I am the in-charge of the department, I have become their Sardar (chief)…There are many chieftains above me too.”
A video of his speech at the function has also gone viral on social media.
He had also made a veiled attack on the present dispensation in Bihar saying the “Mahagatbandhan (Grand Alliance) government in the state is new but its working style is the same old.”
A first-time RJD MLA from Ramgarh, Sudhakar Singh had gone on to say that “the present state government is not fully ours. We are in a coalition.”
A few days ago, he had also questioned the agriculture road map of the state government, saying that the official statistics indicated utter failure of the agriculture road map in achieving its objectives.
Sudhakar Singh is the second minister to have resigned since chief minister Nitish Kumar split with the BJP and formed a government with Lalu Prasad’s RJD and other parties on August 10.
Earlier on September 1, another RJD leader Kartik Kumar had put in his papers after being shifted to low profile sugarcane industry department from law department.
The opposition BJP had been demanding Kumar’s removal from the Grand Alliance government in Bihar, alleging that an arrest warrant was pending against him in a 2014 kidnapping case. Even Grand Alliance partners—Congress and CPI(ML)—had asked chief minister Nitish Kumar to reconsider the decision of inducting Kumar into the cabinet.
