Patna: The Bhartiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) appears heading for a clean sweep in Bihar with the ruling alliance registering victory over one seat and leading over 36 out of total 40 Lok Sabha seats, dealing a massive blow to the opposition Grand Alliance of five parties.
What is a setback for the opposition is that on most of the seats, the NDA candidates have established considerable leads over their rivals and are sure to win.
According to the Election Commission website, both the BJP and the Janata Dal United (JD-U) are leading over 15 seats each while the Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) had established its lead over six seats.
In sharp contrast to them, the opposition alliance is struggling to make its presence felt. What is further strange is that the main the opposition is struggling even in the areas which were once known to be their stronghold. As such, border region with considerable presence of Muslims have been known to be the traditional bastion of both the Congress and the RJD but they put up a poor show even in that region.
For example, the Congress candidate Mohammad Javed is struggling to win the Muslim-dominated Kishanganj seat with a lead of little over 23,000 votes over its rival. Kishanganj is the only constituency in Bihar where Muslims outnumber Hindus and for the past two terms, the Congress had been winning this seat. Same is the case in another Muslim-dominated Katihar constituency where Congress candidate Tariq Anwar is trailing by over 41,000 votes while in Siwan the RJD candidate is trailing by 70,000 votes. Siwan also has significant presence of Muslims.
The poll trend, as such, is a huge blow for the opposition in the sense they had formed a mega alliance of five parties to take on the might of the NDA headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi but their attempts fizzed out. This could be underlined from the fact that the opposition alliance is leading over only three seats in Bihar. Even at the peak of Narendra Modi wave in the last LS polls, the opposition parties had won nine seats but this time their tally looks to be restricting to two seats only.
Yet another shocker fort the Grand Alliance is the defeat of Congress candidate Shatrughan Sinha who was contesting as Congress candidate from Patna Sahib seat after breaking three-decade-old association with the BJP. Sinha lost the polls to BJP rival Ravi Shankar Prasad by over 188,000 votes.
The situation in Begusarai from where young Left leader Kanhaiya Kumar had tried his luck is no different. Official reports said Kanhaiya is trailing behind Giriraj Singh by around 400,000 votes which means his fate is completely sealed now.
A major setback for the opposition was jailing of Rashtriya Janata Dal president Lalu Prasad on this crucial occasion and the courts repeatedly refusing to gram him bails despite his all requests. This left the lengthy poll campaign on the shoulder of inexperienced Tejashwi Yadav, Prasad’s younger son. He invested all energies, addressed over 250 election rallies yet this failed to yield desired results.
Experts said the NDA fought the elections with tremendous unity and focused its campaign on certain issues which impressed the voters. While PM Modi built his campaign primarily around the issue of nationalism, Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar sought votes in the name of his government’s performance as the strategy worked wonders.
More than the Grand Alliance, the election was an acid test for the Bihar chief minister who had returned to the NDA after a gap of five years. In the last LS polls, Kumar’s JD-U had won just two seats and this was a challenge for Kumar to prove his relevance. Finally, he was able to prove his political mettle.
