 "NDA seals Bihar deal: BJP to contest more seats than JDU in a first")
The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) on Monday announced its seat-sharing formula for Bihar ahead of the Lok Sabha (LS) elections, allocating seats to two parties that were not part of its alliance in the state five years back.
The seat-sharing formula also underlined the changed equations in Bihar since the 2020 Bihar Assembly elections, with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) now the lead partner in the alliance, and will contest one more seat than ally Janata Dal (United).
Of the 40 constituencies, the BJP will contest 17 seats, the JDU 16, Chirag Paswan-led Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas) 5, and Hindustan Awam Morcha (HAM) and Rashtriya Lok Morcha (RLM) one each.
Since the JDU’s inception in 2003, it contested more seats than the BJP in 2004 and 2009. It changed in 2019, when after the JDU returned to the NDA, they contested 17 seats each. The latest deal conveyed that the two parties were now on par in Bihar for the LS polls. In the 2020 Assembly polls in Bihar, Chirag Paswan-led LJP fielded its candidates against the JDU, while remaining within the NDA, contributing to the sharp drop in the Nitish Kumar-led party’s tally. The BJP’s strike rate turned out to be significantly better than the JDU’s.
According to the 2024 LS polls seat-sharing formula, former Bihar chief minister Jitan Ram Manjhi-led HAM will contest the Gaya seat and Upendra Kushwaha-led RLM will fight in the Karakat seat. The JDU won Gaya and Karakat constituencies in 2019. Manjhi was the runnerup on the Gaya seat and Kushwaha on the Karakat seat in 2019.
The NDA allocated five seats to the Chirag Paswan-led faction of the LJP, brushing aside the claims of his uncle and Union minister Pashupati Kumar Paras, the sitting Lok Sabha member from Hajipur.
In return for ceding its sitting seats of Gaya and Karakat, the JDU gets to contest the Sheohar Lok Sabha constituency, which the BJP’s Rama Devi won in 2019. Rama Devi, who will turn 75 in May, represented Sheohar in 1998, 2009, 2014, and 2019.
In 2019, the BJP and JDU contested 17 each and Ram Vilas Paswan-led LJP contested six. The three NDA allies won 39 of the 40 seats, winning all their respective seats barring the JDU, which lost the Kishanganj seat to the Congress. Kishanganj is one of the 16 that the JDU will contest in the 2024 LS polls.
The BJP, despite leaving Sheohar to the JDU, will still contest 17 seats, as it did in 2019. The addition to its list is Nawada, which the LJP had won in 2019.
Chirag Paswan-led LJP (Ram Vilas) will contest five seats — Vaishali, Samastipur, Khagaria, Hajipur, and Jamui — instead of the six that Ram Vilas Paswan-led united LJP won five years back.
Paras, who leads the LJP’s faction, was keen to contest the Hajipur seat, which his elder brother, Ram Vilas Paswan, represented eight times since 1977. The Paras-led faction of the LJP is exploring an alliance with the Rashtriya Janata Dal-led ‘grand alliance’, sources said. At the press conference at the BJP headquarters here, Bihar BJP chief Samrat Choudhary, however, maintained that talks were going on with Paras.