New Delhi: Rashtriya Janata Dal(RJD) Chief and Union Railway Minister Lalu Prasad will not attend the Swearing-in ceremony of friend-turned-foe Nitish Kumar on Thursday.
The Swearing-in ceremony, being held at Patna's Gandhi Maidan, will be attended by most of the big leaders of the NDA and 14 ministers along with a deputy chief minister are expected to take oath.
Lalu also refused to blame Ram Vilas Paswan for the defeat of the RJD led alliance in Bihar.
"My fight was not with him. So there is no need to blame him," he said.
Meanwhile Paswan said the Bihar poll results will have no impact on the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government at the Centre.
Paswan, who blamed the Congress and RJD for the poll results, said the results would have been different if his advice of projecting a Muslim as the chief ministerial candidate had been taken seriously by them.
Some leaders of the CPI-M, who are supporting the UPA at the Centre, went so far as to demand that Paswan be sacked.
Paswan recalled that in the February 2005 elections in Jharkhand, Lalu had broken away from the Congress-Jharkhand Mukti Morcha alliance to contest in alliance with the CPI while the CPI-M had contested on its own.
As a result, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) formed the Government in Ranchi with the help of a few independent MLAs, he said.
Paswan felt that the desire for change was strong among the people of Bihar.
"They had accused me of inflexibility by insisting on a Muslim as Chief Minister. But Lalu wanted only Rabri Devi as chief minister. How is it that only I was called unyielding?" he asked.
Paswan, while giving his best wishes to the chief minister designate Nitish Kumar, congratulated the electorate for the verdict, saying the people had got tired of 15 years of Lalu-Rabri misrule.
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