Prashant Kishor met Lalu 5 times with RJD-JDU reunion proposal, I asked him to go away: Rabri Devi

Former Bihar chief minister Rabri Devi on Friday claimed that Nitish Kumar had sent Prashant Kishor five times to meet RJD chief and her husband Lalu Prasad Yadav with the proposal that the RJD and JD(U) merge together and new entity thus formed declare its "prime ministerial candidate" ahead of polls.

If Kishor denies having met Prasad with such a proposal, he is speaking a "blatant lie", she said.

I got infuriated and asked him to go away as I had no trust left in the Bihar chief minister following his betrayal," the RJD national vice president, who is also the leader of the opposition in the legislative council, told a regional news channel here.

Kumar had in 2017 walked out of the Grand Alliance, which was formed upon his party's partnership with the RJD and the Congress. He re-joined the BJP-led NDA.

"All our staff and security personnel deployed here are witnesses. He called on us at least five times, mostly here (her 10, Circular Road residence), and one or two times at paanch number (5, Deshratna Marg - the bungalow allotted to her younger son Tejashwi Yadav)," Rabri Devi said.

"Kishor was sent by Nitish Kumar with the proposal - 'let us merge both parties and declare a prime ministerial candidate'. He came in broad daylight and not clandestinely in the dark of night," she asserted.

Expressing displeasure over Kumar's claim that the RJD supremo keeps talking to Kishor from jail, she said, "Even we, (family members), do not get an opportunity for a telephonic talk with him (Lalu Prasad). And what about the claim by Anant Singh that while he was in jail, Lalan Singh (minister) used to arrange his telephonic talks with Nitish".

A mafia don-turned-politician who represents Mokama assembly segment, Anant Singh was earlier considered close to the Bihar chief minister, but fell out with him prior to the 2015 assembly polls.

His wife Neelam Devi is contesting the Lok Sabha polls as a Congress candidate from Munger, where she is pitted against JD(U)'s Lalan Singh - a state minister and close aide of the chief minister.

Anant Singh made the claim in a recent interview to a local news portal.

Notably, in his recently-published autobiography, Prasad had claimed that Kishor - now the JD(U) national vice-president - had met him as an emissary of Nitish Kumar with the proposal that the chief minister's party be re-included in the Grand Alliance.

Kishor, a poll strategist who became a full-time member of the JD(U) in September last year, took to Twitter admitting that he had met Prasad "many times" before joining the party, but added, "If I were to tell what all was discussed, he (Lalu) would be quite embarrassed".