The most interesting aspect of the Bihar Assembly poll is that perhaps more than results, which is due on November 10, a large number of electorate are anxiously waiting for the post-poll drama, which is becoming a sort of new normal in India. So the party which wins maximum number of seats or gets majority may not be able to form the government.
Though the battle is straight between the ruling National Democratic Alliance and Grand Alliance, the presence of the Lok Janshakti Party of late Ram Vilas Paswan has added a new twist to the whole tussle. The LJP may technically be a constituent of the NDA, but it has become a sort of pain in neck both for the other two partners of the ruling combination, the Janata Dal United and Bharatiya Janata Party. Unlike in the past the LJP is pinning hope not only on five per cent Dussadh (a Dalit sub-caste) votes, but also on various social groups as many senior saffron party and JDU leaders have jumped on its bandwagon after they were denied the ticket of their respective parties. Some of these ‘turncoats’ are in a position of winning election on their own individual strength.
Besides, unlike in the case of Goa and later in Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh, the BJP is this time not very sure that it would really win the horse-trading game. The bitter lesson the party has learnt in Maharashtra where it has been outmanoeuvred by Shiv Sena, NCP and Congress, and in Rajasthan more recently are fresh in the mind.
Incidentally, the by-election for 28 Assembly seats of Madhya Pradesh scheduled on November 3 will also decide the fate of Shivraj Singh Chauhan government. Though it would be a difficult task for the Congress to win 20 seats and thus stake claim for power, if anything goes wrong there the BJP will not be in a strong position to play its cards in Bihar in the case of hung Assembly.
Apparently, the RJD, Congress and Left alliance in Bihar has less contradictions. True the Hindustani Awam Morcha of former chief minister, Jitan Ram Manjhi, Vikassheel Insan Party of film personality Mukesh Sahni and Rashtriya Lok Samata Party of Upendra Kushwaha have left the Grand Alliance. But many in Grand Alliance are of the view that they wanted to get rid of these three parties which have become a sort of burden. In the last year’s Lok Sabha election they demanded too many seats but drew blank.
While HAM and VIP have crossed over to become the constituents of NDA and got seven and 11 seats respectively, RLSP joined hands with Bahujan Samaj Party, All India Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen, etc. to form a Grand Secular Democratic Front. However, this hotch-potch combination is not going to have much impact on the election in Bihar as such.
There is no dearth of analysts who feel that the BJP would dump Nitish Kumar the moment Janata Dal United wins less number of seats than the saffron party itself. But in that case the big question is which party the BJP would join hands with to form the government with its own man as the chief minister. Even if the BJP wins as high as 80 seats out of 110 it is contesting – which appears to be unlikely – it will be 42 short of majority in the House of 243. If in that case the BJP woos the LJP, it would not work as the latter is not in a position to win even a dozen seats. In such a situation the Janata Dal United minus Nitish would be more inclined to join forces with the Grand Alliance.
So the BJP will have to swallow a bitter pill and continue to carry Nitish as the chief minister if his party wins even 40 out of 115 seats it is contesting. A handful of other seats can be managed to once again come to power. However, the good news for the Grand Alliance is that the LJP is cutting the votes of Janata Dal United and BJP and not of the RJD, Congress and Left parties. If the sympathy factor after the death of Ram Vilas really works, the BJP and JD -U may be in hell lot of trouble.
Though the Rashtriya Janata Dal is not facing such situation, the problem with it is that its chief ministerial face, Tejashwi Prasad Yadav, is not even 31 years old. He may be promising but lacks experience, so many neutral voters are not so sure whether they would vote for him or not. Yet at the same time there is the possibility of many young voters – cutting across the caste line – who may opt for him as they want fresh face in Bihar.
However it is the Congress in Bihar which is more vulnerable to poaching by the BJP if any such situation arises. What is feared is that if it wins even 30 or 40 seats, the BJP can with some difficulty engineer a split by wooing two-thirds of its (Congress’) legislators.
So far the electoral battle in Bihar is concerned, it has now been established that it is not going to be an easy one for Nitish Kumar-led NDA as many journalists outside the state were predicting till a few weeks back. If the NDA really does not perform well, its leaders from Patna and Delhi would be responsible.
The crude manner in which lockdown was imposed on March 24 as well as the handling of Coronavirus and subsequent migrant crisis had certainly brought a bad name to the Bihar government. Chief Minister Nitish Kumar himself didn’t come out of his bungalow for three months and left everything at the hands of top police officials and bureaucrats. This had not happened in any other state of the country.
As if that was not enough, the decision of the BJP and Janata Dal United to make the Sushant Singh Rajput suicide case an election issue backfired as there was absolutely no scope whatsoever for politicising the issue. Four months later nothing could come out after such a prolong investigation the electorate are asking as to why so much attention was paid to a non-issue when no care had been taken for the poor people of the state. It needs to be mentioned that actor Sushant Singh Rajput was the cousin of a BJP legislator from Bihar Neeraj Kumar Bablu.
Perhaps the NDA leaders wanted to distract the attention of the people of Bihar as they had got an idea beforehand that there is anger among the people. But the whole exercise appears to have boomeranged.