WITH the Election Commission expected to announce Bihar Assembly poll dates any time now, the BJP may have a hard time sifting through its sitting MLAs as it pushes for more seats within the NDA.
The BJP had finished just behind the RJD as the single-largest party in the 2020 elections, and its 80 MLAs, including 22 ministers, are going into the coming elections dragged down by the weight of anti-incumbency. Nitish Kumar, under whose leadership the NDA is contesting in Bihar, is seeking a fifth stint as CM.
While the party is hoping that the series of schemes and programmes announced by the Nitish Kumar-led NDA government in recent days would balance that out, ideally, it would want to go in with new faces – which is easier said than done.
“The new schemes aimed at different sections have certainly brightened the prospects of the NDA. But the voters’ resentment against sitting MLAs could be a hurdle. It’s anti-incumbency vs sops now in Bihar for us,” a BJP leader from Bihar said.
Sources said that at a BJP core group meeting to finalise candidates last week, one of the options considered was a sweeping overhaul, like the party did in Gujarat ahead of the 2022 Assembly polls. The BJP changed its entire Cabinet in the state, where it was fighting for a seventh term in power, in the months leading up to the polls, to circumvent anti-incumbency, as well as dropped 45 of its 108 sitting MLAs. Among those denied tickets were senior leaders and ministers.
Before that, in 2019, the BJP had changed all its sitting MPs in Chhattisgarh before the Lok Sabha elections.
Both times, the strategy had paid off for the party.
Another leader from Bihar said that while a change on the scale of Gujarat may not be on the cards now, “no one disagrees that the BJP needs to come up with fresh and clean faces as candidates”. Union minister Dharmendra Pradhan, the BJP’s newly appointed Bihar election in-charge, has started meetings with the JD(U) on seat-sharing.
However, a leader noted, since the BJP wants to contest 101-104 constituencies this time in Bihar, the pressure on it is immense, as it must find many more winnable candidates even while dropping some sitting MLAs. Only a couple of its MLAs, such as Amrendra Pratap Singh and C N Gupta, are over 75 years, which means age cannot be a big filter either.
Plus, Bihar is no Gujarat – neither does the BJP have total dominance in Bihar, nor does the state lack in powerful contenders to the party. Which means that having unhappy leaders can prove dear. The BJP has the lesson of Karnataka before it, where many of those denied tickets by it had turned rebels and hurt the party by joining rival camps.
Comparatively, the Nitish Kumar-led JD(U), which is looking to drive a hard bargain for seats, is at an advantage. It has 45 sitting MLAs, with several over the age of 70, and as per a leader, could change up to 50% of its candidates without much tumult.
In the past few days, the BJP has also faced a few blows due to allegations against some of its senior leaders in Bihar by Jan Suraaj founder Prashant Kishor, including the charge that Deputy Chief Minister Samrat Choudhary lied about his age in a murder case.
A BJP MP said that the party needs to create a new narrative, and one way would be “to shift the focus to credible and clean faces”. “Of course, the BJP will fight the elections under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah. But on the ground, we have to project local leadership.”
About the campaign launched by the Opposition over the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise, connecting it to “vote chori”, BJP leaders claim they are not worried. The final poll rolls after the SIR exercise, released on Tuesday, do not show any mass deletions, which means the Opposition may not be able to sustain its pressure on the issue; for its part, the Opposition claims that the very fact that mass deletions have been averted is a testimony to its efforts.
What the BJP is banking on the most is the scheme bonanza by the NDA government – covering minorities, women and the underprivileged. One of the grandest was launched by PM Modi last week where, under the ‘Mukhyamantri Mahila Rojgar Yojana’, Rs 10,000 each was transferred into the bank accounts of 75 lakh women across the state, with more money said to be in the pipeline.