NDA Yet to Finalise Seat-Wise Allocation in Bihar Despite Announcing Seat Share

Even a day after announcing the broad seat share of its constituents, Bihar's ruling NDA today failed to come out with a list of the specific seats to be contested by each of its partners in the upcoming Bihar assembly elections.

After several rounds of brainstorming over the last few days in Patna and New Delhi, NDA yesterday announced the number of seats each constituents would contest.

As per the announcement made by Deputy Chief Minister Samrat Choudhary on Twitter, BJP and JD(U) would field candidates in 101 seats each, with LJP(RV) being in fray in 29 seats. Six seats each have been left for HAM and RLM. Bihar has a 243-seat Legislative Assembly.

NDA leaders were supposed to provide details of the specific seats allotted to each constituent in a joint press conference during the day, but the announcement was deferred apparently due to differences among the partners on a few seats.

Top BJP leaders including Samrat Chaudhary, Nityanand Rai, Nitin Naveen and others met JD(U) working president Sanjay Jha, but a consensus could not be reached. Later, BJP in-charge of Bihar, Dharmendra Pradhan, also helda meeting with senior leaders of his party to solve the issue.

Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar also discussed the issue with senior leaders of his party, including Rajeev Ranjan Singh alias Lalan Singh, Vijay Kumar Chaudhary and Ashok Choudhary. JD(U) also distributed party symbols to some of its candidates for seats where there are no hiccups.

RLM president Upendra Kushwaha, who had expressed his satisfaction yesterday on his party getting six seats, appeared somewhat pained today. He apologised to his large number of party workers for not managing to get the required number of seats to contest from the NDA leadership and conceded that his party's interests were ignored during seat sharing.

HAM patron and union Minister Jeetan Ram Manjhi said that his party had been allotted fewer than the expected number of seats. His party had demanded 15 seats so that it could bag at least eight seats to get the status of a recognised party from the Election Commission.

Polling for Bihar assembly elections is to be held in two phases on November 6 and 11. The votes will be counted on November 14.