Manjhi mollified, gets more than his share

Short-term Bihar Chief Minister Jitan Ram Manjhi has achieved what few other BJP allies have been able to – wrangle more seats out of the hard-nosed BJP President Amit Shah in the NDA’s seat-sharing formula for the upcoming Bihar Assembly elections.

Shah’s uncharacteristic pandering to Manjhi may have left the other Dalit leader from Bihar, Ram Vilas Paswan, smarting. But given that the final contours of the National Democratic Alliance’s seat-sharing formula were formally announced by the BJP President on Monday, Paswan has little room left to vent his frustration.

Manjhi’s newly-formed Hindustani Awam Morcha (Secular) managed to extricate 20 seats, five more than he was originally offered by the BJP. Paswan was reportedly pushed to vacate three seats from his kitty while Upendra Kushwaha of the Rashtriya Lok Samata Party had to part with two seats to accommodate Manjhi. Additionally, as a bemused Amit Shah announced later, BJP is willing to accommodate more of Manjhi’s candidates from its own share of 160 seats.

The seat-sharing formula allots 160 of the 243 seats to the senior partner BJP while sparing 20 for Manjhi’s HAM(S). Ram Vilas Paswan’s Lok Janashakti Party has got 40 seats in his kitty while his colleague Upendra Kushwaha’s Rashtriya Lok Samata Party received 23 seats. Flanked by key alliance leaders like Paswan and Kushwaha besides Manjhi, BJP chief Amit Shah asserted that a “united” NDA was on its way to securing two-thirds majority in the State against the “crumbling” alliance of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, RJD chief Lalu Prasad and Congress.

Shah claimed acrimony among alliance partners LJP and Manjhi-led HAM(S), was “behind them”. “There is no tug of war. There is no tension. You can see their smiling faces,” Shah said, pointing to Paswan and Manjhi and sounding as much relieved as happy after finally thrashing out a seat-sharing arrangement. Shah said some of Manjhi’s party leaders will also contest on BJP’s symbols.

Playing hardball, Manjhi had for days refused to settle for BJP’s offer of 13-15 seats. Manjhi persistently targeted Paswan, claiming he enjoyed better clout with Dalit voters.

Asked about reports of being unhappy with the BJP offer leading to the delay in announcement on seat sharing, Manjhi claimed there was never a fight over the number of seats and his only intention was that NDA should put up as many “winnable” candidates as possible.

With his allies by his side, the BJP chief attacked rivals, saying the Bihar CM was promising to provide a crime-free rule in alliance with Prasad whose tenure in 1990s Kumar had earlier dubbed ‘jungle raj’. “On the one side is a coalition of compulsion and forced arithmetic with little common purpose, while on the other side is an alliance with common chemistry and similar ideologies of development. Time has come for people of Bihar to vote for development,” Shah said.

Shah said the NDA will spell out its agenda in detail in its manifesto to be brought out in the coming days.

BJP’s Central Election Committee is also meeting on Tuesday and could announce names of many party candidates for at least the first few phases of elections.

Asked about RJD chief Prasad’s assertion that the election will be for ‘Mandal Raj-2’, a reference to the 1990s when backward castes rose to dominate the State’s politics, Shah said NDA had more “mandal-wale” (backward and weaker groups) leaders.

Taking on Nitish Kumar, he said the Chief Minister had been citing developmental figures which he had achieved when BJP was a partner in his government and asserted that development had now come to a stop, while crime was rising.