Bihar polls: To woo NDA's voter base and rein in allies, Tejashwi expands RJD's caste net

Looping in Bhumihars

While the RJD’s outreach towards Kushwahas and Koeris, a traditional base of the JD-U often referred to as the Luv-Kush combination in Bihar politics, has been an ongoing effort, the push to loop in Bhumihars is a significant departure for the party that had, in the 2020 Bihar polls, fielded only one Bhumihar candidate.

Sources in the RJD say Tejashwi is now “seriously mulling over” the prospect of fielding “close to a dozen” Bhumihar candidates and that efforts are on to identify “at least one Bhumihar leader in each of the nine divisions of Bihar, whose influence goes beyond his own assembly constituency”.

Likewise, Kushwaha-Koeri candidates fielded by the RJD too are expected to exceed the 2020 figure of eight.

Also read: Bihar’s coalition arithmetic gets more complex ahead of elections

To accommodate leaders from these communities and illustrate his intent to shed the perception about Yadavs being the party's fulcrum, sources said Tejashwi plans to scale back the number of candidates from his caste.

"In 2020, we had contested 144 seats and fielded nearly 60 Yadav candidates but this time while we may contest around 135 seats, the number of Yadav candidates may fall below 50... you will see more representation for a cross-section of castes, including Bhumihars, Kushwahas, Nai, Dhanuk, Teli, Nonia, Tanti, Dusadh, etc.," a senior RJD functionary said.

As per the 2022 Bihar caste survey, Bhumihars make up 2.86 percent of the state’s population while Kushwahas and Koeris collectively constitute another bloc of approximately 4.2 percent.

Tanti-Tatwa communities

While the exact percentage of the EBC Tanti-Tatwa community, was not mentioned in the Bihar caste survey, Indian Inclusive Party chief IP Gupta, who has been leading agitations in the state demanding Tanti-Tatwa be recognised as Scheduled Castes, claimed the community has a population of over 20 lakh in Bihar.

The meeting between Tejashwi and Gupta at the former’s Patna residence on Saturday (October 11) has triggered rumours that the RJD could allocate at least two to three tickets to candidates from the Tanti-Tatwa communities.

Careful poaching

With election season setting off familiar scenes of shifting political loyalties, the RJD has, over the past week, been on a spree of inducting “carefully poached” leaders from the NDA’s ranks who are known to wield influence over different caste groups.

For Tejashwi, arguably the biggest catch over the past week has been Santosh Kushwaha, a former two-term MP from Purnea, who switched to the RJD on October 10 and alleged that his former party that is “standing on the support of Luv-Kush, EBCs and Dalits” was now being “controlled by three leaders (he named Munger MP and Union minister Rajeev Ranjan Singh ‘Lalan’, Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Kumar Jha and Bihar minister Vijay Choudhary) with no mass base”.

Also read: Arrogance or ground realities? Why Tejashwi spurned Owaisi's alliance overtures

The press conference at which the former Purnea MP was inducted into the RJD also saw LJP-RV leader Ajay Kushwaha, former Ghosi MLA Rahul Sharma and Chanakya Prasad, son of JD-U’s sitting Banka MP Giridhari Yadav, switch to Tejashwi’s party. Sharma is the son of influential Bhumihar leader Jagdish Sharma.

The RJD is also likely to induct controversial Bhumihar strongman from Mokama, Surajbhan Singh, into its ranks. If Singh, a former LJP leader whose wife Veena Devi had defeated the JD-U’s Lalan from Munger in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, indeed switches to the RJD, he would be the third prominent Bhumihar leader to team up with Tejashwi in just the past week after Rahul Sharma and JD-U’s incumbent Parbatta MLA Sanjeev Kumar.

Tejashwi, it is learnt, has also been in talks with former Union minister and Rashtriya Lok Janshakti Party chief Pashupati Paras, the estranged uncle of Lok Janshakti Party-Ramvilas chief and Union minister Chirag Paswan. Paras, sources said, is likely to be the Grand Alliance-backed candidate from the Alauli assembly segment in Khagaria district, which he had won six consecutive times between 1985 and 2005.

Machiavellian strategy

Sources close to Tejashwi told The Federal that the bid to enlist all these leaders isn’t limited to the RJD’s caste outreach but is also meant to serve a more Machiavellian purpose.

The leaders being roped in, said a senior RJD leader, are “those who won’t just bring in votes of caste groups which are traditionally inclined towards key NDA constituents like the BJP, JD-U and LJP-R but will also offset any potential trouble from our own allies in some areas... if some influential caste leader from our alliance switches sides, these people will also be able to make up for that loss.”

The RJD leader quoted above cited the example of Santosh Kushwaha’s induction to illustrate his point.

“Santosh Kushwaha’s area is Purnea where we expect Pappu Yadav (the Congress-aligned independent Purnea MP who narrowly won the seat last year by defeating Santosh) to create problems for us because we did not leave the Purnea seat for him in the 2024 Lok Sabha election. We feel whatever damage Pappu tries to do, Santosh will balance it out,” the RJD leader claimed.

Another RJD leader, who has also been serving as Tejashwi’s ‘messenger’ to disgruntled leaders in other parties, who may be amenable to switching to the RJD, told The Federal that the move to poach leaders of various caste groups is also meant to contain "bullying and pressure tactics by our allies since seat-sharing negotiations with them are still ongoing”.

Also read: Battle before the battle: NDA, INDIA in hectic seat-sharing parleys as Bihar poll nears

This leader said that Tejashwi wants to convey a “strong and unambiguous message” to its allies that the “RJD is the engine of the alliance and people across caste groups, including those that aren’t traditional RJD voters see him as the strongest alternative to Nitish Kumar... allies demanding more seats than they deserve because they think they command votes of some particular caste must fall in line or exit because we also have alternative fail-safe arrangements and we can’t go on negotiating seats now”.

Seat-sharing tussles

It is in line with this approach that Tejashwi met IP Gupta on Friday (October 10) and lassoed in Santosh Kushwaha and others a day earlier, said RJD sources, while adding that the hectic meetings and inductions came even as allies like Vikassheel Insaan Party chief Mukesh Sahani were hardening their negotiating stance.

Sahani, who has been demanding at least 30 seats from the RJD along with the assurance of a formal announcement that he would be made the deputy chief minister if the Grand Alliance wins the election on November 14, had been sending dissenting signals for the past two days.

The RJD, say sources, has been wary that Sahani, who projects himself as a torchbearer of the EBC Mallah community that comprises 2.61 per cent of the state’s population, has been creating hurdles in finalising the Grand Alliance’s seat-sharing deal “at the BJP’s behest”.

For the past two days, Sahani had been making cryptic posts on his X account highlighting his "solitary struggle" and “fight for respect”. None of his X posts over the past two days made any mention of the Grand Alliance and were all centred on his “fight for Bihar”.

Late Saturday night, however, Sahani seems to have had a change of heart when he posted on X, “The grand alliance is unbreakable. With Lalu Yadav’s ideology of social justice, we will write a new story of development and equality in Bihar.”

The RJD’s message to the Congress too has been along the same lines.

Sources said that though a broad consensus had been reached with the Congress party on the seat-sharing blueprint and that the Grand Old Party had finally agreed to accept fewer than 60 seats compared to the 70 it contested in alliance with the RJD five years ago, there were still half a dozen seats on which both parties were staking claim.