As the counting of votes for the Bihar assembly election started indicating a clear win for the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) on Friday (November 14), the question on almost everyone’s mind was who would be the next chief minister of the state. Not for NDA ally Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas), however. The party led by Union minister Chirag Paswan has already begun lobbying for the deputy’s chair, irrespective of who the NDA chooses as CM, The Federal has learnt.
The LJP(RV) is staking its claim based on its consistently good performance in elections in the state, said sources. As of 10 pm Friday, Election Commission data showed the party winning 18 of the 29 seats it had contested and leading in one. It had won all five Lok Sabha seats it had contested in 2024.
Chirag eyes identity of Bihar’s top Dalit leader
The NDA was leading in 202 of Bihar's 243 assembly seats, as of 10 pm Friday, a tally only marginally lower than the alliance's all-time best of 206 seats that it had won in 2010. Meanwhile, the BJP looked set to become the single largest party in the state — as of 10 pm Friday, the party was on track to bag at least 89 of the 101 seats it had contested, surpassing the 85 ally Nitish’s Janata Dal (United) looked likely to win.
Which begged the question, would Nitish Kumar, who has led Bihar for nearly two decades now, make a comeback? Or would the BJP, buoyed by its spectacular performance, be prepared to step out of Nitish’s shadow and push one of its own leaders for the top post?
The LJP(RV), which has had a frosty relationship with the JD(U), is learnt to have communicated to the BJP leadership that it would firmly back the party on its choice of CM for the state, even if the post was being offered to Nitish, but that it would also expect to have one of its own leaders to be made deputy CM.
"Our performance is there for people to see. Definitely, it is our right to get the deputy CM’s post,” an LJP(RV) leader told The Federal, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The LJP(RV) chief, sources claimed, now wants to be seen as the pre-eminent Dalit leader in Bihar and his close aides believe that important positions for his party MLAs in the state’s cabinet would signal Chirag's growing stature.
Interestingly, this assembly election in Bihar has also seen Union minister and Dalit leader Jitan Ram Manjhi's Hindustani Awam Morcha (HAM) — an intra-coalition rival of the LJP(RV), as Manjhi perceives himself to be the taller Dalit leader — perform spectacularly well. The party has won five of the six seats it contested.
The genesis of the rift between JD(U) and HAM and Chirag’s LJP(RV) dates back to 2020, when the then united LJP — the party split into two factions, one led by Chirag and the other by his uncle, former Union minister Pashupati Paras in 2021 — chose to contest the Bihar assembly elections independently, following disagreements over seat sharing with Nitish. The LJP hadmanaged to bag only one of the 137 seats it had contested, and Chirag’s decision to go solo had cost the JD(U) and HAM dearly on a number of seats by dividing the votes. The issue continues to rankle with both Nitish and Manjhi.
The differences between the allies were pushed out in the open ahead of this election, when, amidst seat-sharing discussions, the JD(U), HAM and even Upendra Kushwaha's Rashtriya Lok Morcha — which on Friday won four of the six seats it had contested — were left red-faced, when the LJP(RV) walked away with 29 seats, including several constituencies seen as traditional strongholds of Nitish and Manjhi.
Modi and his ‘Hanuman’
In fact, Chirag had indicated even before the elections that his party would make a pitch for the deputy CM’s post. The LJP(RV) chief had, at one point, even been understood to have allowed party members to openly push for Chirag as the next Bihar CM following the NDA’s win in the state, but later refrained from contesting the assembly elections. Instead, he threw his might into relentlessly campaigning for the alliance in the state, even when the JD(U) and HAM leaders exhibited reluctance in canvassing for LJP(RV) candidates.
Chirag has often declared himself to be Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘Hanuman’ — the devoted aide to the Hindu deity Ram in the epic Ramayana. Whether Modi now chooses to oblige his ‘Hanuman’ remains to be seen.
