- BJP not to buckle under Nitish Pressure
- Wants JD(U) to contest 102 seats only
Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group
New Delhi, Sep 26
Former Maharashtra Chief Minister and incharge of BJP’s Bihar unit Devendra Fadnavis will be flying to Patna and later Delhi to finalise party’s strategy for October 28 Assembly polls.
If sources close to Fadnavis are to be believed, the party is unlikely to buckle under Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s pressure in seat-sharing arrangements. Fadnavis will come to Delhi in the first week of October after visiting Patna.
Fadnavis had gauged the mood on tie up when he visited Patna immediately after his surprise appointment to over-see Bihar Assembly polls by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Obviously, Modi was unhappy with the way the BJP had to surrender five extra Lok Sabha seats to Janata Dal (U) during the 2019 polls. The BJP contested 17 seats instead of 22 sacrificing five sitting MPs and gave 17 seats to JD(U). The party high command accepted this humiliation at the hands of Nitish Kumar despite the massive Modi wave.
But now there is no such compulsion. Secondly, Fadnavis is reported to have conveyed to the party high command about the dwindling graph of Nitish Kumar due to mishandling of Coronavirus and migrant labours and floods issues.
Internal field surveys ordered at the instance of Fadnavis showed that PM Modi has a lead of 12% over Nitish Kumar in popularity and its time Nitish made to pay the price. Nitish wants to contest 118 seats but the BJP is unwilling to concede more than 100-102 out of 243 seats.
The BJP also wants to contest 102 seats leaving 39 for LJP, HAM and other new entrants.
Insiders say that open revolt against Nitish Kumar by Chirag Paswan, president of the Bihar LJP is being engineered by the BJP. The BJP brought HAM party’s Jitan Ram Manjhi into the NDA fold and instigated RLSP leader Upendra Kushwaha to leave the RJD-Congress. Perhaps, Modi has not forgotten the day when Nitish Kumar walked out of the NDA in 2013 after he was declared BJP’s prime ministerial candidate. It is a different matter that Nitish Kumar defected to NDA in 2017 to remain in power. Its pay back time for Nitish Kumar.
