With the Election Commission announcing the poll schedule, the spotlight is expected on half a dozen Lok Sabha seats of Bihar, where the BJP-led NDA had made a clean sweep five years ago, winning all but one of the 40 constituencies.
The elections to the 40 Lok Sabha seats in Bihar will be held in seven phases on April 19, 26, May 7, 13, 20, 25 and June 1, the Election Commission said on Saturday.
At least half a dozen seats in the state are likely to be keenly watched, three of these currently held by prominent ministers in the Narendra Modi cabinet.
The seat is held by Pashupati Kumar Paras, the only Union cabinet minister from Bihar who is from outside the BJP. Paras made his Lok Sabha debut in 2019 when his late brother Ram Vilas Paswan, who had represented Hajipur for a total of eight times, chose the Rajya Sabha route.
The LJP founded by late Paswan and then headed by his son and heir apparent Chirag Paswan, was split by Paras in 2021, barely a few months after the founder’s death. Chirag claims to have clinched a favourable deal with the BJP, which includes five seats, including Hajipur, for the Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas), the faction he heads.
Paras, who is digging in his heels, is hoping that the BJP will honour the fact that he has been a consistent ally. He had won the seat by a comfortable margin of more than two lakh votes, though old-timers point out that it was not a patch on electoral performances of late Paswan, who had garnered a record 89 per cent votes on his Lok Sabha debut from the seat in 1977.
Begusarai
The constituency was making national headlines five years ago when it witnessed a high octane battle between Giriraj Singh and former JNU students’ union president Kanhaiya Kumar.
Singh went on to win by a margin of more than four lakh votes, assisted in no small measure by the RJD fielding its own candidate who cut into the anti-BJP votes.
However, the spirited campaign in favour of Kanhaiya, who has since quit CPI to join Congress, saw Bollywood personalities like Javed Akhtar, Prakash Raj and Swara Bhaskar travelling to the nondescript Bihar town, a much talked about aspect of the crowd-funded electioneering.
Arrah
The battle is going to be interesting for the seat, where R K Singh, the Power Minister who took the political plunge after retiring as Union Home Secretary, is serving his second consecutive term.
Although popular among the locals as a pro-active MP, Singh was miffed at rumours that the NDA might choose Bhojpuri singer Pawan Singh, who seems to have burnt his bridges with BJP by refusing to follow the party diktat to contest from Asansol in West Bengal.
Arrah may also witness a Right versus Left battle as CPI(ML) Liberation, which had put up a good fight last time and seems to have grown stronger since the assembly polls of 2020, is likely to throw its hat in the ring again.
Patna Sahib
Named after the Sikh shrine situated at the place where Guru Gobind Singh was born, the constituency covers the capital city and is represented by Ravi Shankar Prasad, who may have lost his ministerial berth but still needs no introduction.
Prasad made his Lok Sabha debut in 2019, when his victory was seen as a foregone conclusion since the electorate here is known to be largely pro-BJP.
However, the margin of 2.8 lakh votes by which Prasad beat Shatrughan Sinha, who had represented the seat twice as a BJP candidate but lost it when seeking re-election on a Congress ticket, was a cause for astonishment.
Pataliputra
Adjoining Patna Sahib, the seat covers rural areas of Patna district, victory margins of second-term BJP MP Ram Kripal Yadav may not have been as spectacular, though the significance of his wins lies in having defeated, on both occasions, the daughter of Lalu Prasad, the RJD president.
Notably, Yadav was himself formerly a trusted aide of Prasad until his disillusionment with the RJD ahead of the Lok Sabha polls of 2014 when he joined the BJP.
The seat came into being after the 2008 delimitation and the RJD president was humiliated in the Lok Sabha polls a year later when he himself lost to another former aide Ranjan Yadav, who entered the fray on a JD(U) ticket. The family is eager to break the jinx.
Kishanganj
In every election in Bihar, a bit of curiosity shall always be about Kishanganj, the only constituency where Muslims account for more than 50 per cent of the total population.
The Congress has been holding the seat for a third consecutive term and in 2019, its debutant Mohd Javed was the only candidate in Bihar to have beaten the BJP-led NDA, which had backed the JD(U).
However, the seat does not lend itself to easy stereotypes, as evident from the fact that it once elected a non-Muslim, socialist leader Lakhan Lal Kapoor, and even more recently, in 1999, the voters gave their mandate to Syed Shahnawaz Hussain despite his being the BJP candidate.