Anti-incumbency, ministers? poor show undid NDA
If exit poll projections fell short of the great expectations of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in Bihar, the actual results came as a much bigger blow. Several NDA stalwarts bit the dust as the RJD-led secular alliance reaped unexpected gains.
If exit poll projections fell short of the great expectations of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in Bihar, the actual results came as a much bigger blow. Several NDA stalwarts bit the dust as the RJD-led secular alliance reaped unexpected gains.
Though the NDA generally did badly, it was the union ministers, who fared terribly. If by including nine MPs from Bihar in his cabinet, Atal Bihari Vajpayee had tried to counter Rabri Devi government in the state, the move came unstuck. The ministers, it would appear, were more unpopular in their respective constituencies than most people had imagined.
All the four BJP ministers in the fray in Bihar – CP Thakur, Shahnawaz Hussain, Sanjay Paswan and Hukumdeo Narain Yadav – fell by the wayside.
Fate of another, Rajiv Pratap Rudy, will be decided later as the polling in Chapra would take place on May 31.
The Janata Dal (U) fared no better. Of its four ministers, only George Fernandes and Nitish Kumar managed to win. Sharad Yadav and Digvijay Singh were trounced, while Nitish also suffered the ignominy of losing his Barh seat.
While the lone Muslim member of the Vajpayee candidate, Shahnawaz Hussain, suffered a major humiliation by losing to RJD’s Taslimuddin by a margin of about 1.60 lakh votes in Kishanganj, Hukumdeo Narain Yadav fared only marginally better as he lost to Congress’ Shakeel Ahmed by about 88,000 votes. Another young turk in Vajpayee ministry, Sanjay Paswan, went down tamely in Nawada. CP Thakur failed to retain his Patna seat.
George Fernandes’ shift to Muzaffarpur nearly ended in a disaster as he could scrape through by only about 9,000 votes. But it was the Nalanda seat, left by Fernandes, which saw to it that Nitish does not share the fate of Sharad Yadav.
It was a different kind of anti-incumbency factor that was at work in Bihar. While the Rabri government bucked the trend suffered by governments of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, the NDA MPs fell prey to it.
Only two of the outgoing 12 BJP MPs could retain their seats, while JD-U retained only four of the 18. The BJP could snatch three seats from the Congress-RJD-LJP-CPM combine with most notable victory being that of former opposition leader of Bihar assembly Sushil Kumar Modi from Bhagalpur.