Patna,(BiharTimes): Though by-polls normally attach less significance the August 21 election for 10 Assembly seats was somewhat different. It was a test of the combined strength of the grand alliance after the coming together of Bade and Chote Bhai as well as that of the state BJP leadership in the Narendra Modi era.
The state unit of the party had something to feel satisfied as it managed to retain four out of the six seats which it held before the poll. After all the party lost two out of three in Karnataka, especially in the stronghold of former chief minister B S Yeddyurappa. The performance of the BJP was not as good in rest of the country too. In Uttarakhand it recently lost all the three seats where the by-polls were held.
The BJP used to held six of the 10 seats before the poll. In fact it was seven. The JD(U) MLA from Mohania, Chhedi Paswan, crossed over to the party. He had to quit. He than contested the Sasaram Lok Sabha election and won it on the saffron party ticket.
So one thing is clear: the NaMo magic is not working in the Assembly by-polls and much depends on how the state party units fare. In Bihar it was the test of SuMo rather than of NaMo and the former has been honest enough to concede that the performance was below expectation.
The main worry for the BJP is not just that its number had got reduced from six to four, but that it lost urban seats, especially that of Bhagalpur and Chapra. Both the seats were in the hands of the party for the last many years. It has been winning the Bhagalpur Assembly seat since 1990. The erstwhile Bharatiya Jan Sangh won all the elections between 1967 and 1980 too.
It has a big Brahmin and Bania voters and had been represented by none else but former health minister Ashwani Choubey. The seat got vacant because of his election to Lok Sabha from Buxar. Several media pundits were expecting that some Muslim voters would vote for the BJP as it was represented by Shahnawaz Husain in the last Lok Sabha.
Besides, it was also argued that weavers were pleased by the budgetary announcement for them by the Narendra Modi government. But the BJP lost in this RSS stronghold. Ajit Sharma, a Congress veteran, managed to defeat the district BJP chief, Nabhay Kumar Chaudhary, quite comfortably by the by-poll standard––by 17,229 votes.
What is more shocking to the BJP is that though Shahnawaz Husain lost the Bhagalpur Lok Sabha seat he managed to establish a lead of about 34,000 over Golu Mandal of the RJD in this segment.
.Similar was the case with the Chapra Assembly seat which was won by Randhir Singh, the son of RJD leader and former MP, Prabhunath Singh by a margin of 24,106 votes. He defeated Kanhaiya Singh of the BJP.
It was a sweet revenge for Lalu Yadav as well as Prabhunath Singh. Lalu’s wife Rabri Devi lost the Saran Lok Sabha seat to the BJP’s Rajiv Pratap Rudy and Prabhunath himself lost to Janardan Singh Sigriwal in neighbouring Maharajganj. In fact Sigriwal used to represent Chapra in the state Assembly for the last many years. This seat got vacated only after he was elected to Lok Sabha.
Once again Rudy established a lead by about 40,000 votes from Chapra Assembly constituency in the Lok Sabha poll. Even Lalu Yadav, who won the seat in 2009, trailed to Rudy from Chapra, an urban segment of the constituency.
Even in the urban seats of Banka and Hajipur the BJP managed to win by relatively smaller margin of 711 and 6,127 votes. In Hajipur the LJP leader and alliance parther, Ram Vilas Paswan, could do little.
The LJP, which contested one of the 10 seats, Parbatta, in alliance with the BJP could not win it. Its candidate Suheli Mehta even forfeited her deposit after losing by a huge margin of 56,990 votes.