Patna:
Top BJP leaders courted arrest in Patna today during a bandh or strike to protest against the JD(U)'s decision to end their 17-year alliance. Ravi Shankar Prasad, Shahnawaz Hussain and Sushil Kumar Modi are among the top BJP leaders in the state who have courted arrest.
Earlier, a group of 150 party workers of the BJP and Janata Dal United or JD(U) clashed in the streets today.
The clashes took place in Patna near the offices of the two parties that are just a few feet apart. Several trains were stopped and roads were blocked during the state-wide shutdown.
Sharad Yadav and Nitish Kumar, the main leaders of the JD(U), had said that their party could not accept the BJP's decision to placed Narendra Modi in charge of its election campaign.
"Mr Modi is a leader of impeccable integrity," BJP leader Ravi Shankar Prasad said during today's bandh. "People are feeling very much humiliated," he said about his party workers.
Mr Modi is criticised by the JD(U) and other detractors of not acting soon or strongly enough to prevent hundreds of Muslims from being killed in 2002 in his state.
The BJP refutes the charges, and accuses the JD(U) of political hypocrisy. "For 17 years, they didn't have a problem with us. Now we are communal?" asked the BJP's Shahnawaz Hussain recently.
On Monday, the BJP said it will release a series of old speeches by Mr Kumar in which he praises the Gujarat Chief Minister. "BJP leaders will visit villages and play these CDS on every nook and corner," said Sushil Kumar Modi, who was sacked as Deputy Chief Minister of Bihar by Mr Kumar on Sunday along with 10 other ministers.
Within hours of the split on Sunday, the BJP released a video of Mr Kumar praising Mr Modi at a government event in Gujarat a year after the riots. Mr Kumar said that it would be poor protocol to go public with attacks at a government event, and that it is standard to praise the host at government functions.