How BJP's allies in Bihar are being the party's biggest spoilsports

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)'s sailing with its alliance partners for the Bihar Assembly elections is not turning out to be a smooth one - as it was during the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. The state elections are four-five months away and the principal party's allies have already started rocking the boat.

Seat-sharing and deciding the chief ministerial candidate are the two issues which are giving the BJP some serious bouts of anxiety. On June 21, two major developments took place, which, if not addressed to in time, may cost the BJP dear. First, Rashtriya Lok Samata Party (RLSP) decided to project its party chief and Union minister of state for human resource development Upendra Kushwaha as the chief ministerial candidate for the Bihar polls.

Second, Union consumer affairs minister Ramvilas Paswan's Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) vowed to oppose five present and former MLAs associated with former Bihar chief minister Jitan Ram Manjhi's Hindustani Awam Morcha (HAM) in the polls. Though the LJP welcomed Manjhi's outfit in the BJP-led coalition, it is averse to dissident Janata Dal (United) [JD(U)] MLA and former agriculture minister Narendra Singh for splitting the LJP in 2005 and walking away with a dozen MLAs. Narendra Singh was the state unit LJP president at that point of time.

The two issues withstanding, it will be an uphill task for the BJP to divide 243 seats among its partners. Besides the LJP and RLSP, the BJP has to also accommodate candidates of Manjhi's HAM and expelled Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) Lok Sabha MP Pappu Yadav, whose latest claim to fame was his threat to hit an air-hostess with slippers during a Jet Airways flight from Patna to Delhi on June 16. Pappu Yadav had defeated JD(U) president Sharad Yadav from Madhepura in the 2014 general elections. Though Yadav contested on an RJD ticket, he fell out with party chief Lalu Prasad recently and is now hobnobbing with the BJP.

Friends in the BJP shrug off the posturing by the RLSP and LJP and nothing more than throwing of tantrums to get maximum seats to contest the assembly elections. Of the total 40 Lok Sabha seats, the BJP had won 22 of the 30 seats it had contested, LJP had won six of the seven seats while RLSP had won all the three seats.

For the assembly seats, the LJP is demanding a whopping 74 seats and the RLSP 67 seats, leaving just 102 seats for the BJP, which has to further accommodate HAM and Pappu Yadav's candidates. This cannot be acceptable to the BJP under any circumstances.

For instance, with just three Lok Sabha seats and five per cent Kushwaha votes, RLSP is demanding more than double the seats it should logically get to contest. But Kushwaha is taking advantage of the BJP's stand of not projecting any chief ministerial candidate. Once bitten in Delhi, the BJP is twice shy now, and has decided to keep Modi as its face as in the assembly elections in Haryana, Jharkhand, Maharashtra and Jammu and Kashmir. In Delhi, they projected former IPS officer Kiran Bedi as its CM candidate and were reduced to just three seats in the 70-member assembly.

With rivals JD(U), RJD and Congress forming an alliance, the BJP has no other way left than to placate its own alliance partners. A tall order for the BJP indeed in the present circumstances.