PatnaOctober 18, 2025 07:18 AM IST
First published on: Oct 18, 2025 at 07:18 AM IST
THE bastion of the late Mohd Taslimuddin, a four-time MP who once held sway over Bihar’s Seemanchal region, is set to witness a second clash between his two sons, Sarfaraz Alam, 55, and Shahnawaz Alam, 43.
While the RJD earlier announced Shahnawaz as its candidate from Jokihat in Araria, on Thursday, Sarfaraz announced that he was switching over from the party to the Jan Suraaj. The party founded by Prashant Kishor is set to field Sarfaraz now from Jokihat.
The JD(U) has fielded its veteran leader Manjar Alam from the seat, and the AIMIM is likely to put up a candidate too. This could mean a four-way split of the Muslim vote.
Sources said that Sarfaraz, who contested in 2020 from Jokihat on the RJD ticket, switched sides after failing to get a ticket from the party. He had lost to Shahnawaz, then an AIMIM candidate, by a narrow margin of over 6,000 votes
One of the five AIMIM leaders who won in 2020, Shahnawaz was among the four who crossed over to the RJD later, and is the incumbent RJD MLA.
Taslimuddin first won from the Jokihat Assembly seat in 1969 and retained it in 1972, 1977, 1985 and 1995, on the ticket of first the Janata Dal and then the RJD. Later, he went on to represent Kishanganj in the Lok Sabha in the 1996, 1998 and 2004 polls, and became a Union minister in the Manmohan Singh-led UPA government.
Even in the midst of the 2014 Narendra Modi-wave Lok Sabha polls, Taslimuddin won from Araria, underlining his hold over Muslim-dominated Seemanchal region.
Sarfaraz entered the political fray in 1996, winning the Jokihat Assembly seat in a bypoll on the JD(U) ticket, after Taslimuddin moved to the Lok Sabha. He retained it in the 2000 polls as an RJD nominee. He won the seat again in 2010 and 2015 for the JD(U). In 2018, after Taslimuddin’s death, Sarfaraz contested the bypoll for the Araria Lok Sabha seat, and won that too.
Sources talk of growing tension between the brothers due to Sarfaraz’s poll feats and Shahnawaz’s unfulfilled political ambitions. In 2020, Shahnawaz finally took the electoral plunge, and succeeded in dealing his elder brother a blow.
RJD spokesperson Mrityunjay Tiwari said the party was not worried about Sarfaraz jumping ship. “It is natural for a party to field its own sitting candidate. The RJD had given the ticket to Sarfaraz in 2020, but he lost. He is a party hopper, who has been in the RJD, JD(U), and has now gone to the Jan Suraaj.”
However, Araria-based political analyst L P Naik said the Taslimuddin family clout may be wearing thin. “With the AIMIM most likely to contest from Jokihat too, the battle will go down to the wire. Who knows, it might even slip away from the family.”