After two phases, it was leading on 89 seats, only 33 away from 122.
New Delhi: When the second phase of the Bihar Assembly elections ended on 3 November, political strategists in both the BJP and the RJD, had told this correspondent that it was advantage Grand Alliance (GA) and the NDA would have to do exceptionally well in the third phase to make up for the loss that it had suffered in the first two phases.
Analysis of the election results proves that the Grand Alliance had indeed done much better than the NDA when the first two phases ended. In the first phase, of the 71 seats that went to the polls, 47 were won by the GA, while on 22 seats it was the NDA candidates who emerged as the winners.
In the second phase, of the 91 seats that went to the polls, 42 were won by the Grand Alliance, while NDA won 51 seats.
Therefore, by the end of the two phases, the Grand Alliance was leading on 89 seats, only 33 seats away from the magic figure of 122. The NDA, on the other hand, was leading on 73 seats, thereby needing to win on at least 49 seats of the 78 that were going to the polls in the third phase to reach the magic figure of 122.
However, in the third phase, the NDA won on 52 seats, thereby reaching the figure of 125 seats, while the Grand Alliance could win only on 21 seats, thereby falling short by 12 seats and getting stuck at 110.
Political strategists believe that some of the things that derailed the RJD’s chances of coming to power were Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s emotive speeches in the last phase, the NDA’s pinpointed focus to remind the voters of the “Jungle-Raj” (which even the PM emphasised on, in his last few speeches), the announcement by CM Nitish Kumar that it was his last election, which pulled women voters out of their homes to go and vote for the NDA, and the fact that the Yadav community members became extremely vocal anticipating an RJD win, leading to a “sense of concern” among the non-Yadav voters,
With the RJD failing to come to power and extending its “vanavas” to 20 years now, the knives are coming out from within the RJD targeting Tejashwi Yadav and his close aides for “failing to utilise” the anti-Nitish Kumar sentiments on the ground. “Tejashwi Yadav had initially stated that all castes will be given equal representation when it came to ticket distribution, but in the end, almost 50% of the tickets were given to Muslims and Yadavs. Secondly, he gave tickets to criminals, a fact which gave more ammunition to the BJP to attack us on the issue of law and order. The whole ticket distribution was handled by Manoj Jha and Abdul Bari Siddiqui, both of whom have a much ‘skewed’ way of looking at things. If Laluji was active today, he would have told his leaders on the ground to ensure that party workers didn’t start behaving as if they had already won. These small things led to the loss of crucial seats in this close election,” a party general secretary said.