BJP hits out at Nitish Kumar for attempts to cover up cause of leader’s death

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Friday hit out at chief minister Nitish Kumar for alleged attempts to cover up the cause of an Opposition party leader’s death during a march to the state assembly this month. Vijay Kumar Singh, the leader, died on July 13 when police resorted to a lathi charge to disperse the march.

The Patna district administration issued a statement late on Thursday saying a medical board concluded that Singh died of “heart disease and other complications related to it”.

State BJP chief Samrat Choudhary rejected the report and said the probe into the events leading to the “unprovoked” lathi charge be handed over to a high court judge.

On July 14, a BJP delegation submitted a memorandum to governor Rajendra Vishwanath Arlekar seeking a Central Bureau of Investigation probe into the lathi charge. The memorandum blamed Kumar and deputy chief minister Tejashwi Prasad Yadav for the lathi charge

Choudhary said the post-mortem report is on the lines of what the government had been saying. “The BJP will not accept any cover-up. It was the murder of our leader at the behest of the government. If the government has the courage, it should hand over the video of the post-mortem to AIIMS [All India Institute of Medical Sciences]. We have reports that it was established he died due to head injury, but later another committee was formed to hush it up.”

Choudhary said Kumar has always been a failure as a leader. “ It was the BJP that made sacrifices to make him the chief minister to end Lalu Yadav’s misrule.”