New Delhi: Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar is in the national capital, meeting leaders of like-minded parties in a bid to bring the opposition under one umbrella to take on the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. It was in this backdrop that Nitish’s ally and former Bihar CM Jitan Ram Manjhi too landed up in Delhi where he led a delegation to meet Union home minister Amit Shah.
Manjhi — who, like the late Ram Vilas Paswan, is a seasoned weathervane of Bihar politics — was quick to deny rumours that his meeting with Shah had anything to do with the prospect of shifting loyalties ahead of 2024.
After his meeting with Shah, Manjhi also met Nitish in Delhi. He then told reporters, “I will remain with Nitish Kumar. He has all the qualities one needs to become the prime minister. He is making an honest effort to unite the opposition to ensure some change in 2024 and has said that it is immaterial whether he is the PM candidate or somebody else is.”
Asked about his father’s meeting with Shah, Hindustani Awam Morcha (Secular) president Santosh Kumar Suman told ThePrint, “They sought an appointment with the PM over our long-pending demand but the PMO told them to meet Amit Shah. We have been demanding Bharat Ratna for Dashrath Manjhi for a long time, there is no politics involved in it.”
Suman insisted that the purpose of his father’s meeting with Shah was to urge the central government to consider the names of the mountain man late Dashrath Manjhi, Bihar’s first CM Shri Krishna Singh and his subsequent successor Karpoori Thakur for the Bharat Ratna.
The BJP, on the other hand, sees Manjhi’s meeting with Shah as the first step towards a political realignment in Bihar politics ahead of 2024.
BJP MLA from Lakhisarai and Leader of the Opposition Vijay Kumar Sinha told ThePrint, “Manjhi ji is a senior leader in Bihar and our doors are always open for those who want to strengthen the hand of PM Modi to provide good governance in Bihar. Nitish Kumar is anyway a sinking ship; he can’t handle Bihar but is busy uniting opposition leaders.”
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‘Bihar BJP has more elbow room’
Nitish, addressing a rally of the ruling Mahagathbandhan (Grand Alliance) in Purnea on 25 February, had hinted that the BJP was “working on” Manjhi. The Janata Dal (United) chief also reassured Manjhi by declaring from the stage that he would be “looked after”.
Asked what one can make of Manjhi having reiterated that he owes Nitish for making him CM in 2014, a Bihar BJP leader who spoke to ThePrint on condition of anonymity pointed out that even Upendra Kushwaha had once said that he would ‘rather die than join hands with the BJP’.
Kushwaha parted ways with the JD(U) and floated his own party, the Rashtriya Lok Janata Dal (RLJP), in February this year.
Manjhi, on the other hand, has shifted loyalties many times in the past after sensing ground realities. For instance, he contested the 2015 Bihar assembly polls in alliance with the BJP.
In February this year, Manjhi took a veiled dig at Deputy CM and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader Tejashwi Yadav by reportedly saying that his son Santosh Kumar Suman was “more qualified to be the next CM of Bihar” as he was “more educated”.
A Bihar BJP leader told ThePrint, “Manjhi has criticised Nitish Kumar many times in the past. He was the first to raise the issue of Dalits being targeted under the state’s prohibition law; he demanded the formation of a coordination committee to discuss the issue but no action was taken.”
“He (Manjhi) had asked for another leader from his party to be made either a state minister or an MLC but that did not happen. He went to the Mahagathbandhan in 2017, parted ways with it in 2017 and went back to it in 2022. This (meeting with Shah) is the first step toward sending a message before he switches over,” the leader added.
Meanwhile, a Bihar BJP functionary added to the argument by pointing out that Mahagathbandhan has seven constituents, while the BJP has only one ally in Bihar.
“He (Manjhi) knows that he won’t get that many seats to contest as part of the grand alliance. Paras (RLJP leader and Union minister Pashupati Kumar Paras) is our only ally in Bihar. With us, he (Manjhi) can get a respectable number of seats, as Ram Vilas Paswan did in the past. The BJP contested only 17 seats (in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls). We have more elbow room to accommodate smaller parties,” added the functionary.
The BJP, if it wants to counter the Mahagathbandhan and its demand for a caste census, needs to enlist the support of smaller parties like the Mukesh Sahni-led Vikassheel Insaan Party (VIP), Kushwaha’s RLJP, Manjhi’s HAM(S) and the Chirag Paswan-led Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas). Sahni, who turned into a vocal critic of the BJP after all three VIP MLAs in Bihar switched over to the BJP in the aftermath of the 2022 Bihar polls, was granted Y+ security cover by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) in February this year.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)