Why today's polls in Bihar are crucial for BJP, Lalu

Among the seven Lok Sabha constituencies in Bihar that go to polls tomorrow are Hajipur where Ram Vilas Paswan is in the fray and Saran, from where Lalu Prasad’s wife Rabri Devi is contesting. They are high-profile candidates and the outcome of these constituencies will be keenly watched, but there is something additional riding on their fate at the polls. [caption id=“attachment_1505739” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  RJD Chief Lalu Prasad. PTI[/caption] For one, Paswan could be facing a tougher election than he’d have liked. The Dalit leader may have won with a wide margin of 4.24 lakh in Hajipur in the 1970s, then a record for any election in independent India, but Bihar is hardly the state it was when he set out in 2004-05 to be a leader in his own right, beyond the shadow of Lalu, then also a UPA ally and the bigger leader in Bihar. But while his switching to the NDA just weeks before elections were announced could have ended as a winning move for his personal ambitions as well as for the BJP/NDA prospects in Bihar, things might not be playing out according to that script. A detailed ground report from Hajipur in The Indian Express says the Yadavs and Muslims, the famed MY combine, is keen to deliver him a bitter lesson for his “political roving eye”. Paswan walked over from being a Modi baiter to an NDA partner, having once demanded that Bihar must have a Muslim chief minister. “We gave him votes to form the government somehow. He played politics with it,” a Hajipur resident is quoted as saying. Taking on Paswan is the 93-year-old sitting MP of Hajipur, JD (U) veteran Ram Sundar Das, who defeated him by less than 40,000 votes in 2009. A repeat defeat for Paswan would erode his position in Bihar’s political pantheon, not to mention that every seat his Lok Janshakti Party can offer from Bihar’s 40 Lok Sabha seats will be crucial for the NDA. Already, thanks to Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s ‘Mahadalit’ commission, Paswan has gone from being a Dalit leader to a leader of the Dushadhs/ Paswans. (The Nitish government sub-classified the scheduled castes, with the Mahadalit Commission in 2007 identifying 21 out of the 22 scheduled castes as Mahadalits or the most deprived. The only excluded SC caste were the Dushadhs/ Paswans.) That caste will play a major role is a given – even Modi asserted his own caste identity in UP ahead of the crucial polling in Bihar tomorrow. Meanwhile, on Rabri’s candidature hinges the establishment of the so-called resurgence of Lalu Prasad in the state he once ruled. Rabri faces former union minister Rajiv Pratap Rudy of the BJP in Saran. Lalu has campaigned unusualy hard for he rand for his daughter who contested from Pataliputra which went to polls earlier. After all, how Wednesday’s polling plays out will indicate just how strong the Modi wave is in Bihar, or rather whether it is indeed strong enough to dislodge old caste equations that have held sway over voting patterns, and whether it is strong enough to sweep past the Rashtriya Janata Dal. Lalu has managed to command huge crowds to attend his rallies, his body language indicates he believes his fortunes are on the upswing. Coupled with Paswan’s keenly contested fortunes in Hajipur, the BJP/NDA has reason to keep their fingers crossed for tomorrow. The other reason to closely watch Bihar’s seven constituencies that go to polls tomorrow is, of course, the Janata Dal (United), which witnessed an unseemly public bickering as party chief Sharad Yadav told a rally he believed that party CM Nitish Kumar and Lalu were both playing the caste card to Bihar’s detriment. Yadav is contesting from Madhepura and was speaking in Muzaffarpur, which goes to polls tomorrow. Yadav later denied the widely rumoured rift in the JD (U) and said his comments were taken out of context, but the damage had been done. While Nitish Kumar’s ascension to the post of Bihar CM in 2005 came alongside much optimism, coming as it did after Lalu’s rule in the 1990s, the JD (U) government’s claims of a booming Bihar may have been somewhat overstated. Five of the seven seats that go to polls tomorrow are with the JD (U), but that is expected to alter drastically. Nitish’s decision to break away from the NDA after Modi’s appointment as campaign committee chief had been opposed by Ydaav, and the fact that the JD (U) is unable to ride this election on the basis of the state government’s supposed successes is seen as Nitish’s personal failure. Much has been written and reported on the Modi wave in Bihar, but with these pulls and pushes there is much at stake on the polling numbers and trends.