File photo: Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar
Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised selfless leadership but delivered selfie leadership, wrote Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar in a
column yesterday on ndtv.com.
The BJP has noticed. "If people are not clicking selfies with Nitish, then we can only wish him all the best for the same," said Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad.
Mr Kumar's comments were made in a column evaluating Prime Minister Narendra Modi's first year in office. Predictably, he found little to celebrate. Mr Kumar and the PM engaged in political warfare for years, even when their parties were allies, both in Bihar and at the national level.
The collaboration was aborted after 17 years in 2013 when Mr Kumar objected to the BJP placing Mr Modi at the heart of its campaign for the national election. The move paid off spectacularly for the BJP, which won an outsized victory. Mr Kumar's party, the Janata Dal United or JDU, was rudely punished, winning just two of the 40 Parliamentary seats in Bihar, where it is in power.
Bihar will vote for its next government in September in what is likely to be a staggered election.
The PM may be criticized by the opposition for his penchant for selfies, but his picture with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang was declared by Forbes as the world's mightiest selfie. It also got a whopping 5,885 retweets.
Mr Modi has been widely credited with his agile use of social media. He has 12.6 million followers on twitter and 2.85 million likes on Facebook. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, in contrast, has after years of resistance, appears to be testing the Twitter landscape- though only via his office - which launched its account 3 weeks ago.
Today, Mr Gandhi, who is visiting Kerala,
posted photographs while having lunch at a fishermen's house in Thrissur.
So smile. Apparently, nobody's immune to a selfie. Over to you, Mr Kumar.