‘George is no longer George’

With the active participation of Sachidanand Sinha and Uday Shankar Singh— two close associates of Jaya Prakash Narayan—the campaign has roped in 200 student and youth volunteers who have sprung out to villages in Muzaffarpur. ‘‘We will tell the people George is no longer the George they had elected years ago,’’ says Anil Prakash, convenor of the Abhiyan.

‘‘We will expose him and people will reject him,’’ he says. The volunteers have got one car, a few motorcycles and mostly cycles. Through corner meetings, seminars and individual campaigns they are telling people just one thing: defeat George.

Sinha, who had convinced George to contest Muzaffarpur while he was in jail in connection with the Baroda dynamite case, remembers how they had campaigned with a cutout of Fernandes. ‘‘We had designed a poster with George in a handcuff and appealed to the people to ‘vote to remove this handcuff.’ But now he is chained in the lust for power,’’ says Sinha.

Uday Shankar Singh, who was the campaign in-charge of George then, says George’s position on the Staines murder and the Gujarat riots disgusted him.

‘‘George gave a clean chit to Dara Singh, who was later convicted. He stated in the Parliament that a few rapes and a few murders are no big deal because it has happened before also. I will tell this to the people of Muzaffarpur though I am not keeping well,’’ Singh says.

George had won in 1977 (78 per cent votes), 1980 (43 per cent), 1989 (68 per cent) and 1991 (50 per cent) from this seat. But that doesn’t at all mean that George has made his personal base here—he had relied on the JP wave first and later on the Janata Dal one. After winning Nalanda three times in ’96, ’98 and ’99 totally at the mercy of Nitish Kumar, George has come back to old turf Muzaffarpur. But his former friends are now bitter foes.

George is trying to use his clout with the central leadership of the BJP to galvanise the party cadre here. But the revolting BJP cadre have not shown sufficient enthusiasm in his favour. The cadres of his party (JD-U) too are not yet visible. With the enormous resources he can command, George is trying to compensate the loss of his old friends.

But the mystery of Muzzaffarpur is the RJD candidate Bhagwan Sahni. Merely two weeks old in the RJD, Sahni—a die hard saffron man throughout his life and a VHP functionary— was nominated by Laloo Prasad Yadav. Sahni’s appeal among RJD’s Muslim stronghold is doubtful. ‘‘That is a difficulty we are facing. By propping up such a dummy candidate the RJD appeared non-serious about the Muzaffarpur contest,’’ says Sachidanand Sinha.