NEW DELHI: Its 20.52% vote share compared to 22.14% of RJD, has set alarm bells ringing among BJP leaders.
The main opposition party in Bihar, Rashtriya Janata Dal, despite winning just four seats in the general elections, got the maximum vote share among all the parties in the state—22.14%.
This has set alarm bells ringing among BJP leaders, in a state which goes to the polls next year in October.
In contrast, the BJP got 20.52% votes while its ally Janata Dal (United) received 18.52% votes and the Lok Jan Shakti Party 6.47% votes.
In 2019, the BJP had got 23.58%, which was almost 6% less than what it had won in 2014 elections which was 29.40.
The trend indicates that the BJP’s vote share has declined almost 10% between 2014 and 2024.
The declining trend was also visible in the Assembly elections when it got 19.46% votes in 2020, a fall of almost 5% from 2014 when it had got 24.4% of the total votes polled.
If this trend is an indicator, the BJPs’ vote share is likely to dip in the upcoming Assembly polls by at least 4-5%.
On the other hand, the RJD had got 15.36% votes in the 2019 general elections which rose by 7% this time. Similarly, in the 2015 Assembly polls, its vote share was 18.4%, which climbed to 23.11% in the 2020 Assembly polls.
In the 2019 polls, the three parties—BJP, JDU and the LJP—had won 39 of the 40 seats. State BJP leaders, led by state president Samrat Chowdhary, till the day of the polling, had shared a positive feedback to the party leadership in Delhi and claimed that the NDA was sweeping all 40 seats. This created a false sense of confidence among the party leadership.
Two sitting ministers of the state cabinet, both from the BJP, while responding to The Sunday Guardian’s queries of the I.N.D.I Alliance performing well on at least 7-8 seats had dismissed the reading as “false” and stated that while party workers and voters were not as enthused this time, the NDA was still going to win 40 seats because of the popularity of Modi.
In contrast Congress functionaries had constantly maintained that the I.N.D.I Alliance was going to win at least 7 seats.
After the results, BJP leaders, while speaking to The Sunday Guardian, said that the state leadership needed to be asked questions on why the projections shared by them with Delhi-based leaders failed to materialize in reality.
Chowdhary, who is also the deputy CM of the state, was appointed as the state president in March last year with the objective to woo the Koeri (Kushwaha) backward caste, which—as per the caste census released by the Nitish Kumar government last year when it was in an alliance with the RJD—is the fourth largest population bloc in the state with 55 lakh and a share of 4.2%. At the time Chowdhary had disputed the findings of this census and said that it was fudged to suit the narrative of RJD-JDU. Kushwaha voters, for a long time, are seen as the vote bank of Nitish.
The idea behind making Chowdhary as the BJP state president was to attract the Kushwaha votes to the BJP fold. However, NDA’s Kushwaha candidates could win only on the two seats of Siwan (JDU) and Valmiki Nagar (BJP). Its most prominent Koeri face, Upendra Kushwaha, lost from the Karakat seat despite Prime Minister Modi campaigning for him.
Political observers and party leaders based in Patna told The Sunday Guardian that appointing Chowdhary as the state president was a mistake as he had a history of hopping from one party to the other and the Kushwaha community does not see him as their community leader, something which was wrongly communicated to the decision makers in the BJP leadership.
“He is not accepted by the voters of the BJP who see him as someone whose conduct is more suited to the regional parties like the RJD and JDU of which he was a part earlier. He has failed to show that he has a vision for the state to the people. He has not been able to remove his casteist mindset despite joining a national party like BJP where you cannot take decisions on the basis of your biases towards one or few particular caste and community.
Even the RJD under Tejashwi has realised this, but Chowdhary has not. Secondly, because of his past and his refusal to move beyond casteist politics, he has not been accepted by the party workers too. A few months ago, a deserving young leader from the party was not appointed at a position in the organization because of his caste and for not showing enough ‘respect’ to the state president. The young man had to go to Delhi and meet leaders there who ensured he was given his due, while bypassing Chowdhary,” a Bihar minister recalled.
A rethink on revamping the party organizational structure in the state, in view of next year’s Assembly elections and the party’s declining vote share, is on the card, with party leaders hinting that a new leader might be brought in Bihar to replace Chowdhary, to remove the taint of the BJP state leadership pandering to only one community.
The fact that this perception was going to hurt the BJP in Bihar in the coming days was also shared with this newspaper by a former Rajya Sabha member in February.
While the BJP cadre was expecting a loss in Aurangabad, since the sitting MP, Sushil Kumar Singh, despite numerous inputs of anti-incumbency against him, refused to come on the ground while banking on “Modi magic” to sail through. However, the losses in Arrah, Buxar, Karakat and Sasaram were “shocking”.
In Pataliputra too, Ram Kripal Yadav, the BJP candidate who lost to Misa Bharti of RJD, was against a formidable opponent and was able to win the last two elections because of the Modi factor—a factor that did not work for him this time.
A “karkyakarta” of the party lamented that due to the short-term vision of the party leaders, the BJP has been reduced to be the “younger” brother in the state.
“The party has been reduced to playing the role of younger brother in the coalition partner in Bihar. In the last 2-3 days, BJP core voters and karyakartas have heavily promoted Chirag Paswan as the next CM face of Bihar on social media. Why is the party asking us to promote Chirag whose party has never crossed 6% vote share ever since its inception,” he wondered.
Another national level functionary narrated an anecdote about how the BJP workers were sidelined by its allies in the recent campaign.
“In Bihar, thousands of selfless BJP karyakartas work day and night to strengthen the BJP, but they are then asked to strengthen the alliance partners by our own leaders who themselves have no mass base. The party leadership needs to understand this. Leave aside the BJP karyakartas, even the party MLAs were ignored in Samastipur Lok Sabha. I saw a JDU leader misbehaving with RSS ground level karyakartas during the election campaign in Valmiki Nagar Lok Sabha. I had come there to campaign/work not for JDU candidate but for Modiji, hence I kept quiet as I did not want to hurt Modiji at any cost because he was the de-facto candidate for all the Lok Sabha seats. So instead of creating a ruckus, I remained a mute spectator,” he said.
According to him, the “big” leader in Patna needs to learn from the Odisha BJP cadre who chose to sit in the opposition all these years but never formed an alliance with BJD and now the BJP has formed the government on its own there.