In Bihar, Ram Vilas Paswan’s Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) will no longer contest legislative elections with the NDA. Due to this uproar, the assembly elections going to be held in the state have become even more interesting.
By the last week of September, several opinion polls were predicted to give the NDA a clear majority and the Grand Alliance to get 100 out of 243 seats in the state. But after LJP is out of NDA, now the whole equation seems to be changing. Nitish Kumar was in the Grand Alliance in the 2015 assembly elections in Bihar, but in 2017 he left the Grand Alliance and joined the NDA.
Officially, Nitish Kumar is the NDA’s chief ministerial candidate, but LJP’s exit from the NDA is now believed that if the BJP gets more seats than the JDU, it can field its CM. If this happens, the LJP can help the BJP, as party president Chirag Paswan has clearly said that Bihar now needs an alternative to Nitish Kumar, who has been CM for the last 15 years.
LJP contested the 2005 assembly elections in the state alone. In the elections held in February that year, the party contested 178 seats and won 29, with 12.63% votes. In the October elections, the LJP contested 203 seats and won 10, securing 11.1% of the vote. Since then, the LJP’s vote share has been declining.
BJP believes that in many seats where the Sarvans dominate, their (BJP’s) vote should be for the victory of JDU candidates. The BJP and JDU contested the 2010 assembly elections together. JDU won 115 out of 141 seats and its voting percentage was 22.61%. In 2015, when JDU was in the Grand Alliance, it contested 101 seats and won 71 seats. Looking at these two assembly elections shows that JDU has done better in NDA, because BJP’s votes got transferred.
The LJP’s objective of contesting elections against JDU is clearly to prevent BJP’s transfer of votes. The LJP’s decision to field candidates in all 122 JDU seats is seen more as a vote-cutting exercise, in which BJP sympathizers would prefer to elect LJP instead of JDU. Now it will be interesting to see who will be the LJP candidates on these seats.
If this scheme works, the BJP can emerge as a king maker by winning more seats than JDU. Those who understand the politics of Bihar are well aware that if this happens, the long-cherished dream of the BJP leaders of Bihar (BJP’s Chief Minister in Bihar) will be fulfilled.
Political experts say that the exit of LJP from the NDA in Bihar is part of a well thought out politics, its real purpose is to bring Nitish Kumar to the margins. He says the way Chirag Paswan has announced his exit from the NDA, in some ways, seems like a sponsored agenda to marginalize Nitish Kumar. It is the game plan that will harm the JDU, giving the BJP a chance to further strengthen its position.
DM Diwakar, former director of AN Sinha Institute of Social Studies, said LJP seems to be working closely with the BJP. He said that in those seats where there is a possibility of a triangular contest, if Dalit votes are split and BJP’s support goes to LJP, then JDU’s problems will increase significantly in those seats.
The irony for Nitish Kumar is that the main opposition to his becoming the CM for the fourth time is emerging not from the Grand Alliance but from the BJP. By September, in several opinion polls, the Grand Alliance was being said to be far behind the NDA.
There is a view of a section in the BJP that Nitish Kumar, riding on the popularity of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, wants to beat the anti-incumbency wave and become CM again. This time the BJP would not like to give Nitish Kumar the CM post so easily and Chirag Paswan will test Nitish Kumar’s popularity for the NDA.
The LJP rebellion against JDU could change the dynamics of pre-poll alliance, as it did in Maharashtra, where Shiv Sena contested assembly elections in 2019, in alliance with BJP, but with the help of Congress and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) government Created. Though the Shiv Sena gave up on the grounds that it wanted Uddhav Thackeray to be the chief minister, analysts said the party felt the BJP’s vote share was increasing.
Although the Rashtriya Janata Dal, dim-witted and maneuvering Lalu Prasad in elections without room capacity, is wary of Nitish Kumar as he threw away GA in 2017, Congress is not. The Left parties, which are also part of the grand alliance, may be willing to tie up with the Congress to keep the BJP out.
Overall, it can now be said that in Bihar, how many seats the RJD, Congress, BJP, JDU and LJP will be able to bring on their own, it is decided that the results of the elections in three phases, which will be held on November 10 Will be announced, depends on. As everyone knows that nothing is impossible in politics, it may be that a new equation of the same kind can be seen in Bihar on 10 November.
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