New Delhi: Prashant Kishore who was the key election strategist for Narendra Modi and Bihar Chief Minister Nithish Kumar has decided to file defamation suit against BJP leader Sushil Modi for his remarks against him, reports said.
On August 30, Sushil Kumar Modi said that Prashat Kishore had been paid nearly nine crores for drafting the details of a new plan for developing Bihar, and for publicizing it. Modi claimed that the money was paid through ‘Citizens Alliance Private Limited’, a firm registered in Noida near Delhi.
Sources close to Kishore said that the defamation lawsuit against Modi will stress that though he helped created Citizens Alliance as a non-profit policy group in 2013, the agency was wound up after the national election and he no longer has any links to it, acting, instead, through another non-profit called I-PAC or the Indian Political Action Committee.
Prashant Kishor was the election strategist who has been bestowed with a top government job in Bihar by the Chief Minister Nithish Kumar. The “Bihar@2025 vision document” is part of Kishor’s assignment which involves creating schemes for the development of one of India’s most backward states.
Pointing to Kishore’s absence from Bihar while his present job as election strategy of his latest client, the Congress, in Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, he said, “After getting Rs. 9.31 crore for preparing the vision document for the state, Kishor neither prepared the document nor discharged his duty as the Chief Minister’s adviser. The Chief Minister should dismiss him from the key job,” said the BJP leader.
Meanwhile, Kishore’s aides on condition of anonymity told NDTV that the nine crores that the BJP is referring to were spent before the election on a campaign called “Badh Chala Bihar”, which saw 40,000 village meetings to collate feedback on what people want the government to focus on. Kumar was criticized by the BJP for passing this off as a government exercise when it was, in fact, PR for him ahead of voting. The money spent was given to two firms that Kishor has no involvement with, they added.
Nithish Kumar was re-elected for a third consecutive term as Chief Minister and he had partnered with Kishor, a unique collaboration because for the Lok Sabha elections, the strategist was a crucial component of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s high-octane bid for the country’s top job.
