After the drubbing in the Lok Sabha polls in Bihar, Janata Dal (United) officer bearers will meet in the national capital on Wednesday to discuss their future political strategy.
The meeting to be chaired by party President Sharad Yadav will be attended by office-bearers from various states including Bihar, the only province in which the party has a government. From Bihar, Rajya Sabha MP RCP Singh, ministers in the state government Shyam Rajak and Bheem Singh and Maulana Ghulam Rasool Balyavi are among the office-bearers, JD(U) general secretary Javed Raza said.
He said the meeting will review the performance of the party in Lok Sabha elections and deliberate future plans of the party for upcoming Assembly elections in Maharashtra and Haryana this year and Bihar and Jharkhand next year. Besides the odd 20 office bearers including general secretaries and Vice Presidents of the party, the heads of JDU's Youth and Student wings will also attend the meeting.
Nitish Kumar, Modi's arch-rival who had served as the Chief Minister of Bihar for the last nine years, stepped down on May 17 from his post following the drubbing of his party at the hands of the BJP-led NDA, which walked away with 31 of the 40 Lok Sabha seats in the state.
Jitan Ram Manjhi, a Mahadalit leader succeeded Kumar as the Bihar Chief Minister, whose government was also supported by Kumar's arch-rival Lalu Prasad's Rashtriya Janta Dal. JD(U), which had won 20 seats in the 2009 elections, was reduced to a mere two MPs this time while the former chief minister Lalu Prasad Yadav-led RJD won four seats. Congress bagged two seats and NCP had to be content with one.
Kumar had walked out of NDA and ended JD(U)'s 17-year-old relationship with BJP in June last year in protest against the elevation of Modi as BJP's prime ministerial candidate.
BJP, which had won 12 Lok Sabha seats in Bihar in 2009 after partnering with Nitish Kumar's JD(U), increased its tally in the state to 22 this time.
This time the BJP had an alliance with Ram Vilas Paswan-led LJP, which bagged six seats, and the Rashtriya Lok Samta Party, which won three bringing 31 in total for the NDA. While BJP is hoping to repeat its Lok Sabha showing in the Assembly elections next year, there are already indications of a realignment in the non-NDA camp there after Kumar's arch-rival in state politics, RJD, extended support to the Manjhi government in the trust vote.
Giving an indication of the NDA's plan to widen its reach in the state, the BJP inducted five members (three from Lok Sabha and two from Rajya Sabha) in the Union Council of Ministers yesterday. The leaders from the state who were sworn in as part of Modi's Cabinet are Ravishankar Prasad, Radha Mohan Singh and LJP chief Paswan (all three as Cabinet Ministers), Dharmendra Pradhan (BJP) as MoS-Independent charge, and Rashtriya Lok Samta Party chief Upendra Kushwaha as Minister of State.
Kushwaha was an MP from JD(U) but later fell out with Kumar following which he formed RLSP and contested the polls in alliance with BJP. That brought about a turn around in his fortunes and all three candidates of his party won in the just-concluded Parliamentary polls. While there is speculation of RJD and JD(U) coming closer to take on the BJP challenge in future, leaders of both parties have downplayed such talks.
There is also a likelihood that a play of the JD(U)-RJD 'bonhomie' could be visible during the elections for Rajya Sabha in which three seats from Bihar quota have fallen vacant and are to be filled up.
There has been a decisive shift in the upper castes votes from JD(U) to BJP this time and the challenge for Nitish Kumar's party future is also to retain its Mahadalit and Extremely Backward Castes Votes as the Lok Sabha election saw the BJP sneaking into the watertight compartments of caste vote blocks in the state.
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