One day after declaring 47 candidates for the November Bihar Assembly elections, the BJP’s Uttar Pradesh ally Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP) said Thursday that it would field its nominees in 153 of the state’s 243 seats.
The SBSP has indicated that its plunge into the Bihar elections would “dent” the prospects of the incumbent NDA in several constituencies.
SBSP president and prominent OBC leader Om Prakash Rajbhar, who is currently a minister in the Yogi Adityanath-led UP government, said if the BJP allots even 3-4 seats to his party as part of the NDA alliance in Bihar, the SBSP would withdraw its all other nominees from the fray there.
He said the SBSP was denied any space in the Bihar polls by his senior ally since the Bihar unit of the BJP “developed cold feet” over giving it any seats.
“Bihar BJP was afraid that if we win, we would have to be given a place in the NDA government there and would have to be allotted some departments as well,” Rajbhar told reporters.
He claimed that in the Bihar Assembly bypolls last year, the SBSP had fielded its candidates in some seats like Tarari and Ramgarh, but withdrew them after the BJP central leadership “requested us to withdraw our bypoll candidates, promising to accommodate us in some state commissions there”. He said, “We had withdrawn our candidates in the Bihar bypolls then, but those promises were not kept.”
Rajbhar said his party’s leaders and workers had been working at the grassroots level in Bihar for the past few years.
The SBSP claims to have a support base among the OBC groups such as Rajbhar, Rajwar, Rajvanshi and Rajghosh, who reportedly make up about 4.2% of Bihar’s population.
Rajbhar claimed that he did not “demand much from the BJP leadership except 4-5 seats for the upcoming Bihar polls, but they still did not agree to share them with the SBSP”, adding that “Now, we are going to field our candidates from 153 seats across Bihar”.
The SBSP has maintained that its move to contest the Bihar elections on its own would “damage the BJP and its NDA allies”.
Rajbhar said that for expansion of his party, “elections will remain a key option”. He claimed that some of the BJP leaders from UP, including Deputy Chief Minister Brajesh Pathak and ex-deputy CM Dinesh Sharma, had supported the proposal of the BJP’s alignment with the SBSP for the Bihar polls.
Asked about the reasons for the SBSP’s foray into Bihar, SBSP general secretary and Rajbhar’s son, Arun Rajbhar, claimed, “We have been contesting various polls in Bihar since 2004, but not since we entered into an alliance with BJP. We have been holding public meetings for the last few years there now.”
The SBSP leaders claimed that in several Assembly constituencies in regions like Buxar, Siwan and Aurangabad, Rajbhar and related groups account for about 25,000 to 70,000 votes. “After UP, Bihar would be a significant state for our party’s growth. In the past few years, we must have held about 60 public meetings in Bihar and there has been a better connect of our workers with the people there. This is why it is significant that we contest these polls,” said a party insider.
Om Prakash Rajbhar also made it clear that the SBSP’s fights in Bihar would not have any bearing on its alliance with the BJP in UP.
In the 2020 Bihar polls, the SBSP had contested in alliance with parties like the BSP and AIMIM, but had failed to open its account.