Patna: In October 2021, former Union minister Pashupati Kumar Paras was one of the most sought-after politicians in Bihar. Low-profile until two months before that, it was only after he engineered a split in the Lok Janshakti Party (LJP), a party founded by his late brother Ram Vilas Paswan, that he was courted by multiple parties.
The Janata Dal (United) wanted him in its corner seemingly to send a message to Paswan’s son Chirag, who caused a significant dent in the party’s votes in the 2020 assembly election, while the BJP wasted no time in inducting him into the National Democratic Alliance council of ministers.
Today, he cuts a lonesome figure. The BJP has struck a seat-sharing deal with nephew and challenger Chirag ahead of the Lok Sabha polls — a move that has caused Paras, an MP from Bihar’s Haijpur, to step down as the Union minister for food processing industries in protest.
Not even the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), the arch-rival of the Nitish Kumar-led government in the state, appears to want him.
“Paras ji is like an empty box. There is nothing inside. Forget the Paswans, he will not even get any votes from his own family,” Sunil Kumar Singh, an RJD MLC and close aide of party chief Lalu Prasad Yadav, told ThePrint.
It was the RJD’s offering of eight Lok Sabha seats to Chirag’s party Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas) that had reportedly caused the BJP to quickly close the deal with the party.
“The RJD is not a party that believes in trying to rehabilitate spent forces,” Singh added.
This political unmooring could also lead to Paras losing four of the five MPs that sided with him when the LJP splintered in 2021. Three sitting MPs, Chandan Singh, brother of bahubali politician Surajbhan Singh, Choudhary Mehboob Ali Kaiser, and Veena Devi are rumoured to be seeking Lok Sabha tickets from the RJD.
The fourth, Samastipur MP Prince Raj, son of Ram Vilas Paswan’s other brother Ram Chandra Paswan who had joined Paras’s camp in 2021, appears to have hit a major political roadblock — Chirag has made it clear that he would not give Lok Sabha tickets to those who rebelled against him.
According to N.K. Chaudhary, a political analyst and former visiting professor of economics at Bihar’s Patna University, Paras has fallen victim to the “natural political instinct of survival of the fittest”.
“If BJP has preferred Chirag over Paras, it means that the party has more faith in Chirag. The BJP is doing this at the national level… It has nothing to do with political ideology,” he said.
For now, Paras and his Rashtriya Lok Janshakti Party (RJLP) are weighing their options. “We will be deciding our future course soon,” its spokesperson, Lalan Chandravanshi, said.
On its part, the BJP denies betraying Paras. However, it also admits that political compulsions forced it to pick Chirag.
“We could not have ignored Chirag, who campaigned for our candidates in the bypolls (in December),” Bihar BJP spokesperson Prem Ranjan Patel said. “On the other hand, Paras ji’s support was limited to making statements. It was clear that the Paswan section of Dalits recognised Chirag and not Paras as the inheritor of late Ram Vilas Paswan’s political legacy.”
What BJP’s move means for Paras
According to the caste survey conducted in Bihar last year, Dalits make up almost 20 percent of the population in the state. Various other estimates put Paswans, a Dalit subcaste that stood solidly behind Ram Vilas Paswan, at 6 percent of Bihar’s voting population.
According to BJP sources, the party, which has been trying to play on Bihar’s caste arithmetic, had made unsuccessful attempts at a rapprochement between Paras and Chirag. However, both leaders wanted Hajipur parliamentary seat, Ram Vilas Paswan’s citadel and Paras’s current seat, the sources added.
When Chirag threatened to pull out of seat-sharing talks, the BJP decided to let Paras go, one senior BJP leader from the state who did not wish to be named told ThePrint.
For Paras, the latest development could potentially mean a return to relative political obscurity. A seven-time MLA who won his first assembly election in 1977 and a former minister in the Nitish Kumar-led Bihar government, Paras mostly remained in Ram Vilas Paswan’s shadow, primarily serving as a go-between Nitish and the LJP leader.
Chirag’s entry and growing importance in LJP appeared to sideline him further — for instance, Ram Vilas Paswan endorsed Paras’s candidature for the 2019 general election from Hajipur only after he was certain that his son Chirag would clinch the Jamui parliamentary seat.
“Despite his long political innings, Paras’s only identity was that he was Ram Vilas Paswan’s brother,” JD(U) leader and former MP Ranjan Prasad Yadav said, adding that the LJP founder took great care of his family members back in their village in Bihar’s Khagaria district.
In June 2021, nearly a year after Paswan’s death from prolonged illness, Paras rebelled against his nephew, declaring that five of the six LJP MPs were with him. The move caused the party to split into two factions.
For Chirag, who’s seen as a greater crowd-puller than his uncle, the BJP’s decision to seemingly pick him over his uncle signifies triumph after two years.
According to the senior BJP leader quoted earlier, “The bottom line is that Paras brings nothing to the table. Chirag does.”
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)
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