The ruling NDA in Bihar on Saturday swept the bypolls to four assembly segments, retaining Imamganj and wresting from the INDIA bloc Tarari, Ramgarh and Belaganj, receiving a boost ahead of assembly elections due next year.
Candidates of the Jan Suraaj, floated recently by former political strategist Prashant Kishor with much fanfare, lost deposits in all but one seat, in a clear indication that the fledgling party needs to cover much ground.
RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav, whose party has now lost the status of the single largest party in the assembly, made light of the debacle and claimed that the Mahagathbandhan, the INDIA bloc’s Bihar prototype, was all set to win the 2025 assembly elections.
The biggest setback for the RJD came in Belaganj, a seat it had been winning since the 1990s, but lost to the JD(U) headed by Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, the arch-rival of its founding president Lalu Prasad.JD(U) candidate Manorama Devi, a former MLC, defeated by more than 21,000 votes RJD’s Vishwanath Kumar Singh, who made his debut from a seat that fell vacant upon election to Lok Sabha of his father Surendra Prasad Yadav, a multiple term MLA.
The margin of victory was greater than the 17,285 votes polled by Mohd Amjad of Jan Suraaj.
Kishor, who addressed a press conference after the results were out, claimed, “Booth-wise analysis shows that Muslims in Belaganj voted mostly for the JD(U), its alliance with the BJP notwithstanding.”
JD(U) national spokesman Rajiv Ranjan Prasad said, “The people of Bihar deserve kudos for rejecting the negativity of the opposition and reposing their trust in Chief Minister Nitish Kumar. Under his leadership, the NDA will win more than 200 seats of the 243-strong assembly in 2025.”
However, Kishor was of the view that the longest-serving CM was “not a factor any more”, and his party’s candidate won her seat on her own steam.
Kishor, however, said that NDA’s ability to surmount the incumbency factor was “a matter of concern”.
The RJD also suffered an embarrassing defeat in Ramgarh, where Kishor’s prediction of the party finishing third or fourth came true.
The forecast had caused Sudhakar Singh, son of state RJD president Jagadanand Singh, the MP from Buxar who had won the assembly seat in 2020, to threaten that Jan Suraaj cadres in the constituency would be beaten up with sticks.
Singh’s younger brother Ajit finished a distant third after BJP winner Ashok Kumar Singh, a former MLA, and Satish Kumar Singh Yadav of the BSP, a party with little foothold in Bihar.
Jan Suraaj candidate Sushil Kumar Singh polled less than four per cent votes.
The BJP also pulled off a stunning victory in Tarari, which falls under the Arrah Lok Sabha seat, currently represented by CPI(ML)’s Sudama Prasad, who had won the assembly segment for two consecutive terms.
CPI(ML) candidate Raju Yadav lost, by a margin of a little over 10,000 votes, to BJP debutant Vishal Prashant, better known as the son of local strongman Sunil Pandey, who was formerly with JD(U) and had recently joined the saffron party.
Jan Suraaj candidate Kiran Singh got less than four per cent votes.
State BJP president Dilip Jaiswal reacted to the performance of his party, which now has the highest number of MLAs in Bihar, and the coalition headed by it, with delight.
“The results have shown that the NDA fought as a team, ‘batenge toh katenge, ek hain to safe hain’ (united we stand, divided we fall),” said Jaiswal in a wordplay on the slogan that was raised by the party during the assembly polls in Jharkhand and Maharashtra.
The most respectable performance from Jan Suraaj came in the reserved Imamganj seat, where its candidate Jitendra Paswan stood third, polling well over 20 per cent votes.
The seat, however, went to Deepa Kumari, daughter-in-law of Union minister Jitan Ram Manjhi, who defeated RJD’s Raushan Kumar by a slender margin of less than 6,000 votes.
Manjhi, who heads the Hindustani Awam Morcha, had vacated Imamganj earlier this year upon getting elected to Lok Sabha from Gaya.
Kishor insisted that the RJD’s inability to wrest the seat from the NDA could not be blamed on Jan Suraaj, which “cut into Manjhi’s votes, else his party would have won by a much bigger margin”.
Yadav, who spoke to journalists hours after the results were announced, insisted, “Losing a few seats is no big deal. In the Lok Sabha polls held just a few months earlier, Mahagathbandhan had a lead in all four assembly segments. We will form the next government in Bihar in 2025”.
With the exception of Ashok Singh in Ramgarh, the winners in all the seats shall be making their debut in the state assembly.
