Patna, Jan 28 (IANS): The Janata Dal United (JD-U) is contesting the Uttar Pradesh election alone but the party's top leadership has not included the names of Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar and union steel minister RCP Singh in the list of star campaigners.

The JD-U on Friday released the list of campaigners from where the names of Nitish Kumar and RCP Singh were missing. Such a decision was taken to avoid a clash between CM Nitish Kumar and PM Narendra Modi during the Uttar Pradesh assembly election campaign. These two leaders were involved in trading political barbs in 2015 when they hurled DNA jibes at each other.

PM Modi during the July 25, 2015 Parivartan rally in Muzaffarpur in Bihar said: There seems to be some problem in his (Nitish Kumar) DNA because the DNA of politics is not like this.

In reply to the PM, Nitish Kumar at that time said: "I am a son on Bihar and my DNA is similar as that of people of Bihar."

The JD-U, over the past few months, has projected Nitish Kumar as PM material and their claim became stronger when the party top leadership announced it will contest the UP polls alone. Now, it seems that the party has surrendered before the BJP as it has not included the names of Nitish Kumar and RCP Singh in the list of campaigners.

The JD-U has listed 15 leaders as the star campaigners of the party for Uttar Pradesh. They are JD-U national president Rajiv Ranjan Singh alias Lalan Singh, Upendra Kushwaha, president of the JD-U parliamentary board, KC Tyagi, national general secretary, Umesh Kushwaha, state president of Bihar, MP Ramnath Thakur, Maulana Gulam Rasool Balyawi, Harshwardhan Singh, Ravindra Prasad Singh, Anup Singh Patel, RP Chaudhary, Surendra Tyagi, Sanjay Kumar, Bharat Patel, Sanjay Dhangar and Dr KK Tirpathi.