A Bihar minister's attempt to defend the state's law-and-order record by pointing to crime in the United States and Japan has drawn a sharp and detailed counterattack from RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav, Leader of the Opposition in the Bihar Legislative Assembly, on Thursday, September 24, 2026. Yadav's post dissects what he calls a desperate deflection — one that reveals, in his telling, the ruling dispensation's inability to own its governance failures.

The minister's US-Japan comparison that ignited the row

The trigger, according to Tejashwi's post, was a minister from the ruling alliance who, while facing questions on Bihar's crime situation, argued that rape, murder, and other offences also occur in America and Japan. Tejashwi's response was caustic and methodical: if a minister wishes to benchmark Bihar — described in the post as the country's poorest and most backward state — against the United States, he ought to measure investment levels, per-capita income, and development indicators, not crime figures. Selectively invoking the US to normalise atrocities, Yadav argues, is an exercise in self-congratulation for the party's core supporters, not a defence of governance.

The 2005 benchmark turned against the government

One of Yadav's sharpest lines in the post flips the ruling alliance's own favourite argument. Chief Minister Nitish Kumar's government, in power since 2005, has long cited that year as a turning point — the end of what rivals called the era of administrative collapse and the start of Sushasan (good governance). Tejashwi seizes on the minister's logic to draw an absurdist conclusion: if Bihar cannot be compared to the US on crime today, the minister implicitly believes Bihar pre-2005 was somehow better than America and Japan at crime control. That the ruling side itself set 2005 as the baseline makes the jab land harder.

Tejashwi's personal provocation — the minister's daughters

Yadav does not stop at policy argument. He notes in the post that the minister is the father of three daughters, and that one of them studies in the United States. That personal detail, Tejashwi suggests, should compel the minister toward greater sensitivity on crimes against women — not toward rhetorical cover for a government that refuses to acknowledge its own failures. The observation shifts the debate from political sparring into a more pointed moral register, even as Yadav frames it as a question of accountability rather than personal attack.

Bihar's long-running law-and-order battle

The exchange slots into a decades-long Bihar political pattern. Nitish Kumar's NDA government has repeatedly invoked the 1990–2005 period — marked by high-profile kidnappings and a perception of administrative collapse — to contrast its own record. The opposition, led by the RJD, counters by highlighting ongoing crimes under the current administration, arguing that improvement claims are overstated. Comparing Indian states to developed democracies during governance debates has become a familiar, if contested, rhetorical device across the country. What makes this episode sharper is the minister reportedly being cornered by journalists rather than the more manageable audience of social-media creators — a detail Tejashwi highlights to underline the government's unpreparedness on the issue.

Bihar's crime statistics, when released by the state police, and any upcoming assembly session debates on law and order will likely determine whether this exchange fades or escalates into a larger legislative confrontation.