JD(U) Hits Back at Sonia Gandhi’s Claims About Nitish Kumar’s Exit From INDIA Bloc

Memoir Claims Stir Political Row

A political controversy has erupted after Congress leader Sonia Gandhi wrote in her memoir that Nitish Kumar, the Janata Dal (United) chief, was under the influence of the Bharatiya Janata Party and was looking for a way out of the opposition INDIA bloc. The book, titled “Belonging: A Journey of Love” and published by HarperCollins India, was released on Tuesday.

What the Memoir Says

According to the book, Gandhi described Kumar’s January 2024 move to rejoin Narendra Modi’s National Democratic Alliance as a premeditated decision rather than a sudden one. She wrote that Kumar had been searching for an opportunity to leave the INDIA bloc and that he had walked out of a crucial meeting of opposition leaders after offering what she called a feeble excuse. That episode, she wrote, left her with the sense that something was afoot. Gandhi also said that the episode, while initially unsettling for the alliance, ultimately hardened its resolve, and she placed his exit within the wider difficulties the opposition faced in staying united ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

JD(U) Rejects the Portrayal

The JD(U) responded on Wednesday, saying it was deeply aggrieved by the way its leader had been depicted. National spokesperson Rajeev Ranjan Prasad described Kumar as the architect and driving force behind the alliance, which is now led by Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi. He credited Kumar with travelling across the country to persuade regional parties, many of them reluctant, to sit down with the Congress, and said the first meeting of the alliance in Patna had been a success. The opposition later held two further meetings, in Bengaluru and Mumbai.

Prasad argued that Kumar left the bloc only after concluding that it could not effectively challenge the NDA, pointing to the ambitions and regional interests of the Congress and its allies. Fellow party leader Sanjay Kumar Jha, a Rajya Sabha MP, went further, calling the remarks petty and frivolous and saying they did not match the seniority of the person who made them. He referred to a recent comment by Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge about Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a sign of a wider pattern among senior Congress leaders.

Competing Accounts of the Alliance’s Origins

Jha stressed that the alliance had come together because of the credibility Kumar enjoyed, not because of Congress goodwill. He noted that Kumar had hosted the first opposition meeting in Patna, but said things had not unfolded in the way he would have wished. Jha also claimed that Kumar had objected to the INDIA acronym itself, and argued that the opposition’s unity talk was, in his view, driven by leaders more concerned with their political dynasties than anything else. These claims frame the dispute as one about who shaped the alliance and why it fractured.

Background

Kumar has switched political alliances several times. He left the NDA in August 2022 to join the Mahagathbandhan and later rejoined the NDA in January 2024, ahead of the Lok Sabha polls. In those elections, the INDIA bloc succeeded in preventing the BJP from securing a majority on its own.

What Next

The exchange shows that the memoir has reopened old questions about the opposition’s cohesion and the circumstances of Kumar’s departure. Neither side has offered a resolution, and the disagreement over the alliance’s history is likely to continue in the political arena.