- Monday, February 24, 2025
Prime minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist party will contest in 17 seats while the Janata Dal United of chief minister Nitish Kumar will contest in 16.
By: Shubham Ghosh
THE Bharatiya Janata Party (BJ)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA), India’s ruling coalition, on Monday (18) pulled off a key seat-sharing arrangement in the eastern state of Bihar ahead of the general elections due to begin next month. The arrangement, under which the Hindu nationalist party will contest in 17 out of 40 seats in the state, will make it the ‘big brother’.
The Janata Dal United (JD-U) of Bihar’s chief minister Nitish Kumar, who returned to the NDA in his latest U-turn in January, will contest in 16 seats. The Lok Janshakti Party of Chirag Paswan will field candidates in five seats while former chief minister Jitan Ram Manjhi’s Hindustan Awam Morcha and former federal minister Upendra Kushwaha’s Rashtriya Lok Morcha will contest in one seat each.
Elections in Bihar will take place across all seven phases — between April 19 and June 1. The results will be declared on June 4.
Read: General election in India, world’s largest democracy: All you need to know
The faction of the LJP led by Chirag’s uncle Pashupati Paras is not part of the NDA. The faction was dropped after it became clear that Chirag Paswan’s unit had a better command over the Paswan community in the state, which constitutes six per cent of Bihar’s voting population.
The JD-U, which was briefly in the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA), was confident about the NDA winning all 40 seats in Bihar.
Read: Modi’s BJP drops nearly 21% of sitting MPs for 2024 elections: Killing anti-incumbency?
In the 2019 general elections, the BJP and JD-U had contested in 17 seats each while LJP, which was then led by the late Ram Vilas Paswan, the father of Chirag and a former federal minister, contested in six.
The NDA won 39 out of 40 seats in that election in Bihar while the remaining one was won by the opposition Indian National Congress. The BJP won 17 and the JD-U bagged 16. The LJP won all the seats in which contested.
The JD-U was not a part of the NDA in the 2014 elections when it won only two out of 38 seats it contested while the NDA bagged 31 seats with the BJP alone getting 22.
