Bihar Assembly bypolls: Parties hand out tickets to kin

Row erupts over Tarari candidate of Prashant Kishor’s Jan Suraaj Party

In the Bihar byelection for four seats, scheduled to be held on November 13, major political parties, including the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Janata Dal-United (JD-U), the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), and the Hindustani Awam Morcha-Secular (HAM-S), have opted to field kin of party leaders as their candidates.

Meanwhile, a row erupted over the announcement by political strategist and founder of the Jan Suraaj Party Prashant Kishor that former Vice Chief of Army Staff Lieutenant General S.K. Singh (Retd.) as his party’s candidate for the Tarari Assembly bypoll. Lt. Gen. Singh is not registered as a voter in the State and is thus ineligible to contest. Mr. Kishor has said Lt. Gen. Singh had submitted Form 8A to the Election Commission of India to include his name in the voters’ list.

Mr. Kishor had earlier announced the candidature of Lt. Gen. Singh from Tarari, academician Khilafat Hussain from Belaganj, and paediatrician Jitendra Paswan from Imamganj. Speaking to media persons in Bhabhua (Kaimur), Mr. Kishor said that he would announce the name of his party’s candidate for the fourth Assembly seat, Ramgarh, on October 22, from among the five prospective names he had announced on Monday.

The BJP has named Vishal Prashant as its candidate for the Tarari (Bhojpur) seat. Mr. Prashant is the son of a former bahubali (strongman) MLA of the Piro Assembly constituency, Sunil Kumar Pandey alias Narendra Kumar Pandey. Mr. Pandey, along with his son, joined the BJP in August. “It is not Mr. Pandey but his son who has been fielded by the party,” State BJP leaders told The Hindu.

The JD(U) has fielded Manorama Devi as the party’s candidate for the Belaganj Assembly bypoll. Ms. Devi is the wife of the notorious Bindi Yadav, and mother of Rocky Yadav, the main accused in the sensational Gaya road rage incident, in which 18-year-old Aaditya Sachdeva was killed in May 2016.

The RJD has picked Vishwanath Kumar Singh, son of the party’s MP from Jehanabad Surendra Yadav, as the mahagathbandhan (grand alliance) candidate against Ms. Devi in Belaganj. The party has nominated Ajit Singh, son of the State party chief Jagdanand Singh, for the Ramgarh Assembly bypoll. Mr. Jagdanand Singh hails from Ramgarh and has won Assembly elections from there before.

Another son of Mr. Jagdanand Singh, Sudhakar Singh, won in the 2020 Assembly election, but he won the Buxar parliamentary seat in the 2024 Lok Sabha election against the BJP’s candidate Mithilesh Tiwari.

Like other allies of the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA), HAM(S) chief Jitan Ram Manjhi too chose to field a member of his family, his daughter-in-law Deepa Manjhi, wife of Santosh Kumar Suman alias Manjhi, the Minister of Information Technology, Minor Irrigation, and Disaster Management in Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s Cabinet, from the Imamganj (reserved) Assembly seat. The RJD has fielded Raushan Kumar Manjhi to contest against Ms. Deepa Manjhi.

Mr. Prashant Kishor has taken flak for his party’s lack of “political-electoral preparedness and foresight” over Lt. Gen. Singh’s candidature. “He (Lt. Gen. Singh) has been a voter of Bihar but recently, he had registered his name as a voter of Noida, where he has been living after his retirement from military service, but he has submitted Form 8A to include his name in the Bihar voters’ list again,” Mr. Kishor said. The Jan Suraaj Party, though, has been gearing up to field someone else, if the party’s technical team, which is examining the issue, is unable to resolve obstacles to Lt. Gen. Singh’s candidature, party leaders said. Lt. Gen. Singh is a native of Karath village in the Tarari Assembly segment.

Since the Model Code of Conduct has already been enforced for the four Assembly constituencies where byelections are scheduled, a senior source in the State Election Commissions told The Hindu, on condition of anonymity, that it was “not possible to change the voter registration at this point of time...In State Assembly and council elections, a candidate has to be a registered voter in the State, but in the parliamentary election, such a rule is not mandatory”.

Published - October 21, 2024 08:35 pm IST