Small parties, big headaches: What’s holding up seat-sharing deals in Bihar

With just a day left for notification of the first phase of Bihar Assembly polls to be issued, the two main political blocs of the state, the ruling NDA and the Opposition’s Grand Alliance, are racing against time to finalise their respective seat-sharing deals. What seems to have, however, become a big headache for the major parties in both alliances is the hard bargain that their smaller partners are trying to strike.

Fight for a bigger pie

Sources in the state’s ruling coalition told The Federal that the BJP and Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s JDU had, after several rounds of parleys, managed to come to an agreement on the number of seats they each would contest. A formal announcement on the seat-sharing deal has, however, been held up because Chirag Paswan’s LJP (Ramvilas), Jitan Ram Manjhi’s Hindustani Awami Morcha and Upendra Kushwaha’s Rashtriya Lok Morcha are all demanding a larger share of seats than what the senior allies are willing to concede.

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Likewise, in the Grand Alliance, the RJD had finally managed to convince a grumbling Congress to settle for fewer than 60 seats while keeping nearly 140 seats in its own kitty. However, unbridled demands of junior partner and Vikassheel Insaan Party (VIP) chief Mukesh Sahani and the “surprisingly unyielding” stance of the CPI-MLL have stalled the Opposition formation’s official announcement of its seat-sharing agreement.

Sources in the NDA said that the BJP was hoping that the stalemate in its alliance would end on Thursday (October 9). What jolted the party at the last minute was the LJP-R’s move of convening a meeting of its MPs and senior leaders the same day in Patna, even as Paswan, a member of the Union cabinet, was in Delhi “attending to ministerial duties”.

A cryptic response from Paswan to the media’s queries on his party’s Patna meeting added further drama to the NDA’s Bihar saga. Paswan told reporters that his party leaders were meeting in Patna to decide the LJP-R’s role in the alliance and that he had to be in Delhi to discharge his ministerial duties “as long as I remain a minister”; a comment that has since sparked rumours of whether the Hajipur MP and Dalit leader plans to walk out of the Union cabinet if his party doesn’t get a “respectable share of seats”. In Patna, Paswan’s brother-in-law and Jamui MP Arun Bharti announced that the party leadership had “unanimously authorised Chirag Paswan to decide on the LJP-R’s strategy for Bihar’s 243 assembly seats” and “the issue of seat-sharing in the alliance”.

Pressure mounts on BJP

What has also complicated matters for the ruling coalition, say BJP sources, is the “absurd and unreasonable demands” Manjhi has been making. A Mahadalit leader and former chief minister, Manjhi, is a member of the Union cabinet like Paswan, but the two leaders are known to share frosty ties. Manjhi, sources close to him say, is peeved at Paswan being given “more importance than he deserves” by the BJP, adding that “parties like ours are being made to compromise so that Paswan is kept happy”.

Kushwaha’s RLM, the third ‘small party’ in the NDA, has maintained a stunning silence in public on the number of seats it wants. Sources close to Kushwaha, a backward caste leader, say he has conveyed to the BJP that his “support should not be taken for granted”. He is also learnt to be upset over being “made to welcome actor-politician Pawan Singh into the BJP and NDA family”. In last year’s Lok Sabha polls, Singh had made his electoral debut as an independent candidate from Bihar’s Karakat, the seat from where Kushwaha was fielded. Kushwaha had finished a distant third on the seat he had once represented in the Lok Sabha, with Singh coming second and the Opposition CPI-MLL’s Raja Ram Singh emerging victorious.

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A senior BJP leader who has been part of the negotiations with the NDA partners told The Federal that Paswan, Manjhi, and Kushwaha had all agreed last week to a seat-sharing formula that gave the LJP-R 28 seats while leaving eight and six seats each for the HAM and the RLM. However, the three small parties “reneged on the deal later” and have since hiked their respective demands. The BJP leader said that while Paswan was back to demanding “at least 40 seats”, Manjhi and Kushwaha were seeking “around 15 seats each” for their outfits.

With the BJP, which is hoping to contest at least 100 of Bihar’s 243 seats, unwilling to revise its initial offer to each of these parties as doing so would naturally bring down its own share, Manjhi has issued an ultimatum. “We have made a simple request to the BJP. We want to get the official stamp of a recognised political party, and for that to happen, we must win at least 8 seats. Our strike rate in the last Assembly election was over 60 percent (HAM had contested on 7 seats and won 4), and so keeping that in mind, we want 15 or 16 seats this time so we can win 8 seats and become a recognised party. If the BJP can’t give us these many seats, then I don’t think we should put up any candidate at all because fighting on just 6 or 7 seats will be pointless,” Manjhi said.

Grand Alliance faces friction

The situation within the Grand Alliance appears to be just as volatile, with Sahani refusing to scale down his demand for seats from 30 against the “maximum of 15 seats” that the RJD and Congress are willing to allocate to his party. Additionally, Sahani also wants that the announcement of the final seat-sharing deal must be accompanied by Tejashwi declaring him as the alliance’s deputy chief minister face.

The CPI-MLL, which had surprised many political observers in 2020 by winning 12 of the 19 seats it contested as the RJD and Congress’ alliance partner, is also unwilling to accept the 20 seats that it was being offered this time round. The Left party, sources said, has staked a claim for another five seats based on its “excellent strike rate” during the last election and the “intense ground work it has done across these 25 seats” over the past five years.

In an election that has turned Extremely Backward Castes and Dalits as the most sought-after voting blocs across the state for both NDA and the Grand Alliance, it is hardly surprising that the ‘bigger parties’, be it the BJP or JDU in the NDA or the Opposition formation’s RJD, are being forced to bend over backwards to appease their smaller allies.

For the BJP and JDU, slighting Dalit leaders like Paswan and Manjhi or a backward leader like Kushwaha presents the same set of problems that the RJD faces in spurning Sahani, who belongs to the EBC Mallah (a sub-group of the Nishad caste) community, or even the CPI-MLL, which draws a chunk of votes from the EBCs and Dalits.

Countdown to seal deal

A senior RJD leader who has been part of the negotiations with Sahani told The Federal, “We know that what he is demanding is way beyond his electoral strength and we are also aware the BJP is also reaching out to him to switch sides but we just can’t let him go now... the VIP may not be able to win many seats but because Sahani has projected himself as the ‘son of mallah’ to encash his caste identity, he has the potential to damage us in at least 20-25 constituencies that fall along the Ganga, Kosi and other rivers because the mallah community has a sizeable vote in each of these seats.”

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For now, the BJP’s interlocutors are trying to win over Paswan, Manjhi and Kushwaha with assurances of “adjustments” in the Rajya Sabha and the Bihar legislative council at a later stage. The Congress too has sent its interlocutors to Patna for a meeting scheduled with Tejashwi on Thursday evening, where the two parties are expected to discuss the possibility of “giving up a few more seats” from their respective quotas to ensure that Sahani, the CPI-MLL, CPI and CPM do not have grounds to walk out of the alliance.

A final announcement on the seat-sharing deals of both coalitions is expected on Friday (October 10), when the process for filing nominations for the first phase of polling, due on November 6 (the second phase of polling is on November 11), will begin.