Central BJP brass is trying to firm up an alliance in the state after Nitish Kumar-led JDU left the NDA to be a part of the Grand Alliance.
NEW DELHI: With the Lok Sabha elections scheduled for just one year from now, both the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and the Grand Alliance (GA) in Bihar are yet to sort out the seat distribution among its partners.
For the total 40 seats of Lok Sabha, the BJP-led NDA has, as of now, to take care of the demands of five partners. In the case of the Grand Alliance, these 40 seats will be divided among seven parties, if the alliance doesn’t break, that is.
The understanding among the GA leaders is that since its allies are in partnership for a long time, are successfully running the state and all of the seat-sharing decisions will be taken at Patna and hence, they are unlikely to face much problems during the seat distribution.
However, the same does not hold true for the NDA. The central BJP leadership is desperately looking to firm up its alliance in the state following the decision of the Nitish Kumar-led Janata Dal (United) to leave the NDA and become a part of the Grand Alliance and for this to happen, it will have to “sacrifice” a substantial amount of the seats for those parties whom it wants to take along. The party strategists say that apart from the work done by the Modi government, they also need to take along “caste leaders” to defeat the formidable looking GA. As of now, the BJP has the support of only one ally in the state— that of one of the two factions of the Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) —that is led by Union minister Pashupati Paras. However, it is expected that the other faction, led by Chirag Paswan, too, will join the NDA in the coming months. Such speculation has gained more strength after Chirag was accorded Z-category central security, something that is much coveted by him, by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) in January.
Apart from these two entities, both of whom claim to be the voice of the Paswan voters in the state, BJP is likely to join hands with the Vikas Sheel Insaan Party (VSIP) led by Mukesh Shahni, who suffered a body blow when all the three MLAs of his party defected to the BJP last year in March.
Despite that, with the Rastriya Janata Dal (RJD)-led Grand Alliance not showing willingness to accept him into its fold, Shahni has no options but to seek refuge in the NDA. In February, he was given Y+ security by the central government to placate him following the defection of his MLAs to the BJP.
Similarly, in the same month, Upendra Kushwaha, who has been a part of virtually every Bihar-based political alliance, irrespective of its political stand, left the JDU and formed a new party, Rashtriya Lok Janata Dal (RLJD). Next month, he, like Paswan and Shahni, was given the Y+ security.
None of these three leaders have so far proved through electoral results that they have a mass following on the ground. In theory, come May general elections, the BJP will have four ally partners to take on the Grand Alliance.
However, state BJP leaders—who were rejoicing, in what ultimately turned out to be a short-lived happiness, on the prospect of fighting all the Lok Sabha seats alone for the first time after the departure of Nitish Kumar—are upset over what they believe is going to be another political hara-kiri of bringing the “Shahnis and the Paswans” into the BJP fold.
According to them, these ideas were being pushed by few leaders who have no mass following on the ground. “Elections after elections have shown that both VIP and the LJP have added virtually nothing to the BJP’s cause in Bihar. They are led by opportunistic individuals, whose only objective is to take a pie in the power. After a long time, the opportunity for BJP to contest on all the 40 seats had arisen, but now it is being reported that at least 8-10 seats will be distributed between the four (referring to the two factions of the LJP, VISP and RLJD). If this continues to happen, when will the original BJP workers contest the elections? Where will he go? And why should he help these outsiders and for how long?” a Patna-based party functionary told The Sunday Guardian.
The BJP had in the 2019 general election contested on 19 seats. Similar sentiments were shared by a senior RSS functionary who has worked in Bihar in the past and speaks regularly to BJP leaders from the state. According to him, rather than strengthening these individual family run parties who take every political action with the sole objective of staying in power and have no “philosophy”, it is advisable for the party to promote its own people.
In the 2020 assembly elections, the LJP, despite having the perceived advantage of voters’ sympathy due to the passing away of party’s patriarch Ram Vilas Paswan just before the elections, could only win one of the 135 seats that it contested while polling 5.66% of the total votes polled. It lost deposit in a staggering 110 seats.
This was in line with its past records—since its split from the Janata Dal United (JDU) in November 2000, the LJP, till 2020 elections, contested four Assembly elections in Bihar (February 2005, October 2005, October 2010 and October 2015). In these four elections, it has won only 44 seats of the total 498 seats that it has contested across the 20 years of its existence, which means that its winning percentage is barely 9%. In the February 2005 elections, it got 12.62% of the total votes polled, which came down to 11.10% in October 2005. The vote share of LJP further decreased to 6.75% in the 2010 polls. In the 2015 elections, where the party contested on 42 seats but could only win on two seats, it got only 4.8% of the total votes polled. The VSIP had contested on 13 and won 4 seats while joining hands with the BJP. It secured 1.52% votes. Upendra Kushwaha, who was the leader of the now defunct Rashtriya Lok Samata Party (RLSP), contested on 99 seats, won on zero and forfeited deposits on 94 seats, while securing 1.77% of the total votes polled. According to a senior Patna-based BJP functionary, these alliance decisions have, as the records show, not allowed the BJP to expand in the state and the same history was likely to be repeated next year too.