Bihar bypolls: Jury out on Lalu’s impact

For Prasad, who returned to Bihar in the last week of October for the first time since December 2017 when he was jailed in Jharkhand in fodder scam cases, this was the first election campaign since 2015.

Political observers in Bihar are divided over the impact an ailing Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) chief Lalu Prasad has been able to make on the results of the bypolls for two assembly seats in the state. 

JD(U) supporters celebrate after party's victory in Bihar bypolls, in Patna. (Santosh Kumar/HT Photo)

For Prasad, who returned to Bihar in the last week of October for the first time since December 2017 when he was jailed in Jharkhand in fodder scam cases, this was the first election campaign since 2015.

And the results have been mixed.

Chief minister Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United), which had won Tarapur in 2000 state polls by over 7,000 votes, has managed to retain the seat, but only with a margin of less than 4,000 votes.

Party leaders said it was Prasad’s idea to field a Vaishya community candidate from Tarapur as an experiment to woo the sizeable number of voters from the traders’ community, considered to be traditional vote bank of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance.

In Kusheshwar Asthan, a Congress stronghold till it went to JD(U) in 2020, RJD snubbed its ally and fielded its own candidate. In 2020, Congress has contested the seat as part of RJD-led alliance and lost by nearly 7,000 votes. This time, RJD finished second, trailing JD(U) by nearly 12,000 votes. Congress, however, lost its deposit.     

“We may have lost, but we fought strongly in both the seats. In Kusheshwar Asthan, we have done very well despite contesting the seat after a long time,” said RJD’s Tejashwi Prasad Yadav.

Experts believe Congress’s dismal performance in both seats has given ammunition to the RJD chief to justify his decision of contesting Kusheshwar Asthan too, in case there is a patch-up with the ally.

“Lalu took the decision of contesting both the seats unilaterally as a calculated move to assess the party’s political base in constituencies where it has not put up candidates in the past elections. He knows there are no immediate elections in the next two years and there is always a scope of patching up with the Congress high command in the longer run,” says D M Diwakar, an avid political observer and former director of A N Sinha Institute of Social Sciences.

Diwakar is of the view that RJD’s performance in the bypolls would have been much worse has Lalu not joined the campaign. “ Lalu is still a charismatic leader and his presence in Patna did give fillip to the party in performing better,” he says.

However, political analyst and former principal of Patna College, Nawal Kishore Choudhary, is convinced there was no “Lalu factor” in the bypolls. “There was no impact of the RJD chief in the polls. RJD always had a political base in the two seats and Tejashwi got its dividends in the 2020 assembly polls when the party won 75 seats. It is wrong that to link Lalu’s campaign as a decisive factor influencing the bypolls,” he says.

JD(U) leader and water resources minister Sanjay Jha too echoed the same view. “People of the state have tasted development and reposed faith in the Nitish Kumar government. Younger generation voters do not identify with the RJD or Lalu Prasad, who had little impact on the polls,” Jha said.

However, RJD’s state spokesperson Mritunjay Tiwary said Prasad’s presence was a big morale booster for the party’s rank and file.