In Bihar, BJP works out a tentative seat-sharing formula for 2024 elections
BJP vice president Santosh Pathak said the party was very strong on seats won by its alliance partners in 2019 and the party was working on winning these seats in 2024
PATNA: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has proposed to field party leaders on about 30 out of 40 Lok Sabha seats in Bihar in 2024 and leave the remaining seats for its alliance partners, people familiar aware of the matter said.
The tentative plan has been worked out in consultation with the central leadership of the party and would be firmed up closer to the national elections next year after getting feedback from its partners, the people said. The BJP, which has 17 MPs in the Lok Sabha from Bihar, has four allies: the two rival factions of the Lok Janshakti Party led by Chirag Paswan and Pashupati Kumar Paras, Upendra Kushwaha-led Rashtriya Lok Janata Dal (RLJD) and Jitan Ram Manjhi-led Hindustani Awam Morcha (Secular) or HAM (S).
A senior BJP functionary who was part of the deliberations said the party has targeted to win 30-36 seats from Bihar and had worked out a tentative seat-sharing formula.
According to this preliminary plan, the BJP, in addition to fielding candidates from the 17 seats it won in 2019, will contest 13 out of 16 seats which were won by its former partner, the Janata Dal (United).
BJP leaders said it was proposed to give the two LJP factions six seats which it won in 2019, two seats to Kushwaha’s RLJD and one seat to HAM-S.
The BJP has identified 10 such seats on which its allies had won in the last elections. These seats include Valmiki Nagar, Katihar, Purnia, Gaya, Jhanjharpur, Supaul, Munger, Kishanganj, Nawada and Vaishali.
“BJP does not want to do any kind of negligence on these seats. The organisation of BJP is very strong in the Lok Sabha constituencies where the allies’ candidates had won. In such a situation, preparations are being made so that victory can be achieved easily,” said BJP vice president Santosh Pathak.
Cluster Plan
A BJP leader said each constituency is part of a cluster, for which a leader has been made in-charge. “Under the plan, apart from former deputy CM Tarkishore Prasad, Renu Devi, former ministers Amarendra Pratap Singh, Narayan Prasad, Ramsurat Rai, Alok Ranjan Jha, Nitin Naveen, Janak Ram, Pramod Kumar, Neeraj Singh Bablu, Rampreet Paswan, Rana Randhir Singh and MLA Sanjeev Chaurasia and Legislative Councillor Ghanshyam Thakur have been given the responsibility of four assembly constituencies each,” said the leader.
These people have been entrusted with the responsibility of motivating the voters via social media and meetings at the booth level. Before this, a three-level committee was formed at the central, local and district levels to collect information on the implementation and impact of the welfare schemes being run by the central government and prepare a detailed report.
According to a party functionary, the cadre will reach out with details of how central schemes have benefited people. “Things have changed drastically on the ground after 2014 (when the BJP came to power at the Centre) and we will go to the people with the list of our accomplishments,” the functionary said.
Social combination
The BJP is hoping to build an unusual social coalition that includes the ‘upper’ castes and a majority of backward classes in Bihar to face the formidable alliance between the Rashtriya Janata Dal and the Janata Dal-United, which inflicted a crushing defeat in the 2015 assembly elections.
The BJP believes it will be able to breach the support base of CM Nitish Kumar’s JD(U), which has long enjoyed the backing of non-Yadav backward castes and some Dalit communities and appointed Samrat Choudhary, a Kushwaha, as its state unit president.
Besides working on getting the Kushwahas’ support, the BJP is working on a wider plan to expand its support base among the many numerically smaller castes.
The party’s decision to get Shambhu Sharan Patel elected to the Rajya Sabha last year is also seen as an effort in this direction. Patel enjoyed little recognition within the party but the fact that he came from the Dhanuk caste, a part of the extremely backward classes (EBCs), tilted the scale in his favour.
The party, in a bid to woo the EBC, which makes up about 30% of the state’s electorate, named Hari Sahni, MLC and an influential caste leader from Darbhanga district, as the leader of opposition in the state legislative council. Sahni comes from the Mallah (boatman) caste, a sub-group of the Nishad community of EBC which has a sizable presence in several Lok Sabha constituencies like Vaishali, Muzaffarpur, Darbhanga and Madhubani.