PM Modi uses Sting video to slam Nitish & Lalu

Hundreds of thousands of people lined up at polling stations in the east Indian state of Bihar on Monday for elections being seen as a referendum of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s popularity.

In this campaign, Mr Kumar has joined with Mr Lalu Prasad, a former rival, to lead a tag-team coalition of Bihar’s two most popular chief ministers in the last two decades.

Regional parties will be enthused to forge similar alliances to contest upcoming major elections in states like Uttar Pradesh – which promises the mother of all battles – in 2017, our correspondent says.

The Election Commission gave this assurance to a BJP delegation, which met with the Chief Election Commissioner and other two Election Commissioners, and submitted a letter against corrupt practices by the Bihar Government in the on-going Assembly elections.

In the build-up to the Bihar assembly elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party enthusiastically projected Narendra Modi as its main vote catcher. This despair is of Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad.

She said support for the BJP is more pronounced in urban than in rural areas.

Bihar has always been notorious for corruption, and as the first phase of voting got under way on Monday, Kumar’s party was forced to drop a top-ranking minister after he was caught on camera apparently accepting bundles of cash from a businessman.

The BJP’s poll managers were hoping that Lalu Prasad Yadav’s comments on the beef controversy would backfire and polarise votes in favour of the NDA, but the issue does not appear to have cut ice with voters in the state.

So far in the first phase, 46 percent of the approximately 13.5 million eligible voters have cast their votes, according to data released by the Election Commission of India.

Votes for the five-phase poll will be counted on 8 November. Yet that strategy might not work against Mr Kumar, who boasts a solid record of growth in Bihar and is confident he’ll win when results are announced on November 8.

But Modi sought to hit out at Nitish for the scandal saying such charges of corruption had never been levelled against his government when the BJP was part of it. In August, Modi attended a pair of events and pledged $19 billion in aid to Bihar, one of India’s largest development packages to the impoverished state.

A probe by CBI should be held to find out the entire chain of extortion of money by Bihar Govt. Ministers and ruling party leaders in the state.