Small is strong in Bihar, as spoilsport or as kingmaker

New Delhi: Humbling memories of the last assembly elections serve as a cautionary tale for major parties in the two rival alliances in Bihar as they seek to accommodate demands of their smaller allies in a state with a polarised electoral battlefield where they can either play a spoilsport or multiply gains of their big brothers.BJP and JDU senior netas were huddled in Patna Tuesday to decide on which of their partners will contest on some of the seats after Chirag Paswan-led Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas) made its claim over a few constituencies seen by the CM Nitish Kumar-led party as its backyard.LJP had drilled home the point about its disproportionately disruptive influence when it walked out of NDA to contest on its own in 2020 after its seat-share demand was snubbed by its bigger partners, especially JDU.

Paswan’s party contested on 135 seats and could win only one but ensured the defeat of JDU, its primary target, in over two dozen seats, taking a heavy toll on Nitish’s political weight.For more than a decade, it was Nitish who held the balance, ensuring NDA’s electoral dominance in back to back assembly polls in 2005 and 2010, and then romping home along with RJD in 2015 before LJP struck a serious blow to its standing five years later.

With both alliances enjoying a strong and committed vote bank populated by voters mostly along caste lines, a party like LJP with solid backing of over 5% Paswans can break the numerical stalemate involving big players.Newbies like Union minister Jitan Ram Manjhi-led HAM can do the same in the region of his influence over votes of Mushhars, less than 3% and the poorest among SCs, and Mukesh Sahani-led Vikassheel Insaan Party (VIP) hopes to wield a similar influence by appealing to a group of castes, traditionally boatmen and fishermen.Unhappy with RJD, VIP had jumped to NDA’s side in 2020, when less than 15,000 votes separated the two alliances. NDA won 125 seats against opposition’s 110 but had a merely .03% higher vote share. Hurt in 2020, JDU and BJP are now treading cautiously as LJP drives a hard bargain. Things are, if anything, more complicated in ‘Mahagathbandhan’ — RJD-Congress-Left-VIP bloc.While NDA has managed a division of the number of seats among its constituents, a consensus has so far eluded the rival alliance, with the Congress driving a hard bargain on not only the number of seats it will contest but also choice of its seats.Several RJD members are unhappy with Congress for not endorsing its de facto head and former deputy CM Tejashwi Yadav as the CM face of the alliance but electoral compulsions have ensured that their party cannot brush aside the claims of Congress after playing a second fiddle to its functionary Rahul Gandhi during his ‘Voter Adhikar Yatra’ in Aug-Sept. Congress coupled with the Left, especially CPI-ML, and VIP can bring incremental votes to RJD, which has long enjoyed the solid support of the state’s two biggest voting blocs in Muslims and Yadavs but failed to draw enough support from other communities to ride a winning combination.As Prashant Kishor’s Jan Suraaj Party emerges as another potential disruptor in the polls scheduled for Nov 6 and 11, lead partners in both alliances try hard to protect their flanks even if it costs them a few extra seats.