As Bihar inches towards the 2025 assembly elections, the big question before both the key alliances—grand alliances and NDA bloc—is seat sharing as allies are asking for a bigger pie.
Union Minister and Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas) chief Chirag Paswan wants a sizeable number of seats in the assembly polls.
In 2020, the then-undivided LJP contested 134 seats but won only one, as they contested independently, away from the NDA, while making Chief Minister Nitish Kumar their main target. In the run-up to the polls, he has been critical of the Nitish Kumar government over the issue of law and order.
Now, as the poll date draws closer, he has toned down his attack on the state government, but has kept up the demands for over 40 seats.
When Paswan had contested separately, JDU and BJP had contested 115 and 110. To accommodate, three other allies—LJP, Jitan Ram Manjhi and Upendra Kushwaha’s two parties, the main parties, JDU and BJP may contest 100 seats each, with JDU contesting one more to signal its big brother position.
The remaining 40-odd seats would get divided between the three other parties.
Between these three, Chirag’s party would get the maximum seats, while Manjhi and Kushwaha may have to contend with nearly 20 seats between them. Chirag’s party had won all five seats it contested during the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
Chirag has positioned himself as the youth leader in the state and has been attracting crowds to his rallies. He has been taking a nuanced stance, where he presents himself as a partner in the NDA government at the centre, but not as one sharing power in the state.
This shields him from any anti-incumbency that may exist against the state government.
The state, which has patriarchal politics from the likes of Lalu Prasad Yadav, Nitish Kumar, Ram Vilas Paswan, some parties are pushing for younger faces. Chirag, Tejashwi, and now, Prashant Kishor, promise to herald a new politics, a break from the past.
The political observers in the state argue that the higher number of seats which Chirag would get may help the BJP more than the JDU, once the issue of leadership is taken up if they win the polls. Despite winning more seats, the BJP had supported Nitish Kumar as the CM.
This year, Nitish Kumar is once again the CM face, but the experience of Maharashtra is still fresh. Here, the elections were contested with Eknath Shinde as the CM, but after the results, the BJP, with a higher number of seats, got the CM’s post.
With dedicated votes in almost all the constituencies, Paswan knows his value to the alliance.
The Bihar elections are crucial as they would decide the political trajectory in the coming months. An upset for NDA would indicate a slide, and be billed as a victory of the vote-chori campaign; and a victory would signal the BJP to strengthen its ideological drive in the Hindi heartland.