Patna: The stage is set for the crucial first phase of the assembly elections in Bihar on Thursday, as 3.75 crore voters will decide the electoral fate of 1,314 candidates, including top leaders such as INDIA bloc’s chief ministerial face Tejashwi Yadav and Deputy CM Samrat Choudhary of the BJP.
Yadav aims at a hat-trick in Raghopur, while his principal challenger Satish Kumar of the BJP had defeated his mother Rabri Devi in 2010 while contesting on a JD(U) symbol.
The seat was expected to witness a high-voltage contest, with Jan Suraaj Party founder Prashant Kishor declaring that he wanted to take on Yadav on his home turf.
However, Kishor decided not to contest, and his party gave a ticket to a less fancied candidate Chanchal Singh.
In adjoining Mahua, Yadav’s estranged elder brother Tej Pratap, who has floated his own outfit Janshakti Janata Dal, is locked in a multi-cornered contest.
The elder son of RJD president Lalu Prasad seeks to wrest the seat from sitting RJD MLA Mukesh Raushan, though the presence of Sanjay Singh, the Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas) candidate who represents the NDA, and Independent Ashma Parveen, the runner-up of 2020, has queered the pitch.
Several ministers in the Nitish Kumar government, including Deputy Chief Ministers Samrat Choudhary and Vijay Kumar Sinha, will also have their electoral fates decided in the first phase of polls.
Sinha hopes to retain Lakhisarai for the fourth consecutive term, surmounting the not-so-formidable challenge provided by Amresh Kumar of the Congress and Suraj Kumar of the Jan Suraaj Party.
Choudhary, who is enjoying his second consecutive term in the legislative council, is contesting a direct election after about a decade from Tarapur.
His victory is bound to cement his position in a party which he joined less than a decade ago, but where his political stock has risen rapidly.
The former state BJP president faces a stiff challenge from RJD’s Arun Kumar Sah, who had lost the seat in 2020 by a thin margin of about 5,000 votes.
Somewhat similar to Choudhary’s case is that of Mangal Pandey, a minister and a former state BJP president who is contesting from Siwan, the first instance of his fighting an assembly election.
Pandey, who has been an MLC since 2012, faces a formidable adversary in RJD’s Awadh Bihari Chaudhary, a former assembly Speaker who has been a several-term MLA from the seat.
The neighbouring seat of Raghunathpur is being keenly watched because of Osama Shahab, the 31-year-old son of deceased gangster-turned-politician Mohd Shahabuddin, a several-term MP from Siwan who was known as the “uncrowned king” of the area.
Osama’s candidature has been latched onto by the NDA, which cites it as proof that the RJD stood for “return of jungle raj”, and BJP leaders like Himanta Biswa Sarma have even pointed out that the name reminded one of slain terrorist Osama Bin Laden.
Other seats and candidates whose performance would be keenly watched are young folk singer Maithili Thakur (BJP-Aliganj) and Bhojpuri superstars Khesari Lal Yadav (RJD-Chhapra) and Ritesh Pandey (Jan Suraaj Party – Kargahar).
About a dozen ministers, most of them from the BJP, which has the lion’s share in the cabinet by virtue of its superior strength in the assembly, are in the fray.
They are Nitin Nabin (Bankipur), Sanjay Saraogi (Darbhanga), Jibesh Kumar (Jale) and Kedar Prasad Gupta (Kurhani), all of whom will be defending their seats.
Ministers, belonging to Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s JD(U), whose fate will be decided in the first phase, include Shrawan Kumar (Nalanda) and Vijay Kumar Chaudhary (Sarairanjan).
One of the most keenly watched contests will be in Mokama, where JD(U)’s Anant Singh, who is in jail in connection with the killing of a Jan Suraaj Party supporter during the election campaign, is locked in a straight battle with RJD’s Veena Devi, married to Suraj Bhan, a gangster.
According to the Election Commission, of the 121 seats which go to polls, Digha, which represents the western part of the state capital, has the maximum number of about 4.58 lakh voters, while Barbigha in Sheikhpura district has the lowest of 2.32 lakh voters.
Kurhani and Muzaffarpur have the largest number of 20 candidates each in the fray, while the reserved constituencies of Bhorey and Alauli, besides Parbatta, have five candidates each.
Voting will take place at 45,341 polling stations, an overwhelming majority of which (36,733) fall in rural areas.
According to the Election Commission, of the 3.75 crore voters in the 121 constituencies, 10.72 lakh were “new electors”.
The number of voters in the age group of 18-19 years, though, was 7.38 lakh.
Total population of these constituencies, as stated by the Election Commission, was 6.60 crore, indicating that nearly three crore people were not in the voters’ list, because of being underage or other unspecified reasons.
The assembly elections are being carried out soon after the special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, which now has 7.24 crore voters across the state, about 60 lakh less than the size before the exercise was undertaken.
