As electioneering progressed in Bihar, the tone and tenor of the leaders slowly changed from development towards caste equations. Facing a charged up Rashtriya Janata Dal chief Lalu Prasad, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leadership fell back on wooing the electorate in the name of caste. BJP prime ministerial pick Narendra Modi addressed rallies in all the six constituencies - Valmiki Nagar, Paschim Champaran, Purvi Champaran, Gopalganj (SC), Vaishali and Siwan - where voting will take place on May 12 and everywhere he alleged that his rivals were opposing him as he came from an extremely backward caste.
On the other hand Lalu Prasad claimed that he would stop Modi's march just like he had halted BJP patriarch LK Advani's rath yatra at Samastipur on October 23, 1990 during the height of the Ram Janambhoomi-Babri Masjid controversy. While Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar sought votes in the name of development work, empowerment of weaker sections, Muslims and the women, his poorly attended rallies point to the fact that his appeal has failed to sway voters in the highly polarised state.
In all the seats it promises to be a multi-cornered fight with all the three main contenders - BJP, RJD and JDU - sounding confident of putting up a good show. In some of the seats like Siwan and Vaishali the presence of strong candidates from smaller parties and independents has made it very interesting forcing the candidates to sweat it out in the over 40 degree Celsius heat.
In the 2009 elections the BJP had won Paschim Champaran and Purvi Champaran, JDU Valmiki Nagar and Gopalganj (SC), RJD bagged Vaishali while the then Independent candidate Om Prakash Yadav, who is now with the BJP, had emerged victorious in Siwan. Gopalganj is Lalu's home district but after the delimitation in 2009 it has been reserved for the Scheduled Caste community. Five years back the BJP and JDU were together and their juggernaut had crushed the opposition but now the RJD-Congress-NCP alliance posses a formidable challenge to the erstwhile allies.
The BJP and JDU are contesting the election without each other's support for the first time since 1996 after breaking their highly successful 17-year-old alliance in June 2013.
Yet the BJP is sitting pretty due to the massive anti-incumbency against the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government at the Centre and the JDU government of Nitish Kumar in Bihar, which does not have the backing of any aggressive group in the caste-ridden society of the state. The BJP also has Ram Vilas Paswan's Lok Janshakti Party and Upendra Kushwaha's Rashtriya Lok Samata Party to back it and the two have somewhat compensated the loss of JDU votes.
There are 90 candidates, including five women, in the last round of electoral battle spread across the northwestern part of the state. Their fate will be decided by 88,33,901 eligible voters out of whom 47,25,330 are males, 41,08,370 females and 201 belong to the other category. The largest constituency electorate wise is Gopalganj with 16,04,649 voters and the smallest is Paschim Champaran with 13,66,080 voters. Voting will take place at 8,379 polling stations with the help of 8,379 control units and 11,319 ballot units.
The six Lok Sabha seats have 36 assembly constituencies and five - Valmiki Nagar and Ramnagar in Valmiki Nagar seat and Minapur, Paru and Sahebganj in Vaishali - are Naxal-hit and the Election Commission and Bihar Police have made elaborate arrangement to ensure security. Voting will be held from 7 am to 4 pm in the Naxal affected areas. The Indo-Nepal border has been sealed and strict vigil is being maintained at the Bihar-UP border.
A total of 142 companies of Central paramilitary forces, 74 companies of Bihar Military Police, 26,761 personnel of district armed police and 9,318 homeguards have been deployed. Bihar Chief Secretary Ashok Kumar Sinha said that two Indian Air Force helicopters will also be deployed on May 12. Mounted police personnel, 36 motor boats and 307 motorcycle-borne policemen have been deployed in the diara and riverine areas.
The seats going to polls:
Valmiki Nagar: Sitting JDU MP Baidyanath Prasad Mahto had easily won the 2009 election defeating his nearest rival and Independent candidate Fakhruddin by 1,83,675 votes. Mahto secured 46.40 per cent while Fakhruddin got just 15.71 per cent of the total votes cast. None of the other candidates could cross the eight per cent mark.
But now Mahto faces a tough fight against BJP candidate Satish Chandra Dubey and Congress's Purnmasi Ram, who won in 2009 from Gopalganj as a JDU candidate but was expelled in March 2014. Ram then joined Congress and got the ticket to contest from Valmiki Nagar.
While there are 11 other candidates, it is only Bahujan Samaj Party's Shailesh Kumar Diwakar who is likely to get a substantial number of votes which could upset all the calculation.
Paschim Champaran: BJP's Dr Sanjay Jaiswal had won in 2009 in a close contest defeating filmmaker Prakash Jha who was then a LJP ticket. Jaiswal managed to win by 47,343 votes.
But now Jha is a JDU candidate and is not only banking on Nitish Kumar's clean image and development work, but also the work done by him in the constituency in the last five years even though in 2010 he had announced that he would never contest an election. Jha had lost from the same seat in 2004 when he stood an independent candidate.
The other strong candidate is RJD's Raghunath Jha, who stood a distant fourth in Valmiki Nagar in the 2009 elections. BSP's Syed Shamim Akhtar may pick a substantial number of minority votes. The other eight candidates are just to make up the numbers.
Purvi Champaran: Even though BJP sitting MP Radha Mohan Singh is not very popular, he has a strong caste combination backing him which makes his task easier. Out of the 14 other candidates, it is JDU's Avanish Kumar Singh and RJD nominee Vinod Kumar Shrivastav who are mounting a serious challenge.
Avanish Kumar Singh is an MLA from Chiraia in the Purvi Champaran district. He had won in 2010 Assembly elections on a BJP ticket but was expelled from the party in March 2014 and joined the JDU after he praised Nitish Kumar and declared that he would work for him during the Lok Sabha elections.
Vinod Kumar Shrivastav has campaigned aggressively and hopes to not only get Yadav and Muslim votes but also a large number from the other sections.
Vaishali: RJD sitting MP Raghuvansh Prasad Singh, whose appeal cuts across the entrenched caste barriers in Bihar, is in the fray for the sixth time from the cradle of democracy and the land where the first republic of the world was established. Singh has represented Vaishali in the Lok Sabha since 1996. In the last election Singh had won the seat by a very small margin of 22,308 votes against JDU's Vijay Kumar Shukla alias Munna Shukla, a notorious strongman of the area.
This time Shukla's wife Annu Shukla, MLA from Lalganj, is contesting as an Independent after being denied the ticket by JDU leadership. She is expected to get a sizeable number of Bhumihar votes.
The LJP which is contesting the seat as per the arrangement with BJP has put up another known strongman Rama Kishore Singh, who like Raghuvansh comes from the Rajput community. While the Rajput votes are likely to split, it also depends on how the community has voted in Saran from where Lalu's wife Rabri Devi is in the fray and the Yadavs in Maharajganj from where Prabhunath Singh, another Rajput and RJD nominee, is contesting.
JDU leader Vijay Kumar Sahni, a mallah, is also popular in the area and the four-cornered contest has left everyone guessing about the result in May 16. There are 18 other candidates in the fray.
Gopalganj (SC): This is the home district of Lalu Prasad where his ancestral village Phulwaria is situated. But it was reserved for SCs in the delimitation of 2009 and the RJD has given it to the Congress which has put up Jyoti Bharti. This seat once again a prestige issue for Lalu and he has devoted a lot of time to ensure Jyoti's victory.
This seat was won by JDU in 2009 but the party expelled its MP Purnmasi Ram for anti-party activities. This time JDU has put up Anil Kumar, a former two-time Rajya Sabha MP. Kumar, who was in the RJD and lost from Gopalganj in 2009, joined the JDU in January 2014.
The BJP, too, has put up a turncoat Janak Ram, another 2009 loser. Ram was with the BSP earlier. There are 11 other candidates in the fray.
Siwan: This seat was once synonymous with criminal-politician Mohammad Shahabuddin who was unchallenged from the early part of 1990s till 2005. The town's notoriety came to national prominence on March 31, 1997 when former Jawaharlal Nehru University Student Union president Chandrashekhar was killed.
Shahabuddin, who is serving a jail term in an abduction-murder case, is no longer in the fray but the RJD has given the ticket to his wife Heena Shahab. She had lost the 2009 election to independent candidate Om Prakash Yadav by 63,430 votes with the JDU candidate Brishin Patel coming fourth with just 43,968 votes.
Om Prakash Yadav is now with the BJP and with Heena, too, is contesting again, the fight has become very interesting. The JDU has fielded its MLC Manoj Kumar Singh while the Communist Party of India - Marxist-Leninist Liberation has named its veteran leader Amar Nath Yadav.
The CPI-ML-L has a strong presence in the area and Yadav is the only leader who has stood up to Shahabuddin's might. Yadav had come third in the 2009 election.
There are nine other candidates and surprisingly none of them is an independent.
Comments
0 comment