Ending weeks of speculation about his whereabouts, RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav clarified on Twitter on Saturday, 29 June, that he had been undergoing treatment since his party's rout in the Lok Sabha polls, reported IANS.
Yadav, who is the Leader of Opposition in the Bihar Assembly, was not present on the first day of the Monsoon Session on Friday, 28 June.
The former Deputy Chief Minister has been ‘missing’ from public life since 29 May, when he attended a Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) review meet to assess the reasons for the party's Lok Sabha election debacle.
In a strong message to his political rivals who have been taunting him over his absence from public life, he tweeted: “We are accountable to people who look for a socialist-secular and social justice alternative in us and wish to assure that we are very much here and the fight is on... Recent developments helped me study, scrutinise, analyse and appraise the things in a different way.”
The younger son of RJD chief Lalu Prasad also expressed his concern over the deaths of more than 150 children due to Acute Encephalitis Syndrome (AES) in Muzaffarpur and the areas surrounding it.
In another tweet, the cricketer-turned-politician said: “Since its birth, the RJD has been at the centre of poor peoples’ struggle and that position is not lost only because of an electoral defeat. Wish to assure the people of Bihar as well as our spirited cadre, we are going to fight with renewed commitment on everyday life issues of poor.”
Media reports speculated that he was visiting Singapore, where one of his elder sisters had settled after marriage, or that the cricket enthusiast was in England to watch the World Cup tournament, according to PTI.
Posters had been put up in a number of Bihar towns proclaiming that the RJD leader had gone “missing”, while party leaders including his mother Rabri Devi remained tight-lipped about his absence.
(With inputs from IANS and PTI.)
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