Nadda’s late night meeting sets Bihar BJP plot rolling
By Manish Anand
New Delhi, September 7: A late night meeting by the Bharatiya Janata Party president JP Nadda is making a number of top ranking leaders in the party guessing about the plans of the saffron outfit in Bihar.
Janata Dal (United) walked out of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) to form a government with the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) in Bihar.
The Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has quickly made the change of the government in Bihar not a standalone political development, but part of the larger plot for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
With a smiling RJD patriarch Lalu Prasad Yadav blessing him before he departed for the national capital to show that he’s carrying the Opposition unity burden in all earnest, Kumar has met heads of a number of opposition parties so far, which also included the Congress chief Rahul Gandhi.
The BJP has gone into a shell with the emergence of the socialist bloc in Bihar. The caste arithmetic, the constituent vote base of the JD (U), RJD, Congress, the Left parties, is seen to have the potential to send the BJP to the electoral margins in the state.
“The BJP will need to think out of the box to counter the social justice politics of Bihar. Muslim-Yadav-Kurmi consolidation will be too potent for the BJP,” said a senior BJP functionary.
In this backdrop, Nadda had a special meeting, past midnight at his home with a key Bihar player, which may drop hints of the plans afoot in the BJP.
“The Lok Jan Shakti Party chief Chirag Paswan met Nadda this week late in the night. This meeting came after a number of meetings among the top ranking party leaders to take stock of the political situations in Bihar,” sources said.
To shed further light on the significance of the late night meeting, sources said that the BJP’s challenge in Bihar is on account of “tired and fatigued state leaders, who have lost touch with the ground after sharing power for several years with Kumar in the state”.
The BJP has shown eagerness to import leaders from outside to make a quick electoral gains, as had been the case with the Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma. Now, Sarma is a template for the BJP, which was demonstrated in the constitution of the Parliamentary Board.
Sources further explained that Paswan is now left alone and there cannot be any space for him in the socialist camp after he crossed the “Luxman Rekha” in the 2020 Bihar Assembly elections.
“Ram Vilas Paswan always kept his doors open, and never made enemies, but his son did exactly opposite with Kumar. He has, thus, limited space, but the BJP needs him now desperately,” sources added.
Chirag Paswan has shown that he can hit the grounds, and build a campaign against the Bihar Chief Minister, something that the BJP wants to work on.
The upper castes, Dalit and extremely backward caste equation would be the social engineering that the BJP would be working on in Bihar, added the sources.
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