Just over six months after Bihar’s Assembly polls, the alliance between the Opposition parties RJD and the LJP has developed cracks that resulted in the RJD announcing its support to the CPI(M) candidate in the upcoming Purnea Assembly bypoll without taking the LJP into confidence.
Despite leaders of both the parties denying any rift, the turns of events leading to the RJD’s unilateral announcement on Friday and the LJP’s continuing indecision over the bypoll offer enough reasons to suggest that RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav and his LJP counterpart Ram Vilas Paswan have started getting distant from each other.
With the RJD-LJP combine having contested the 2010 Assembly polls together, it was widely expected that the alliance would put up a joint candidate for the Purnea bypoll, which was necessitated by the murder of ruling BJP MLA Raj Kishore Keshri allegedly by a lady teacher on January 4. The RJD, which had left the Purnea seat to the LJP in the 2010 Assembly polls, reportedly decided not to contest the bypoll after the LJP insisted on putting up its own candidate.
Since the BJP has fielded its slain MLA’s widow and hopes to win the seat easily, RJD leaders Ramchandra Purve and Abdul Bari Siddiqui argued that their party decided to support CPI(M) candidate Amit Sarkar in order to prevent the disintegration of secular votes. They said the CPI(M) had written to the RJD seeking its support. But the LJP, which claims to be as secular as the RJD, is yet to decide on which party to support. “We will support the non-NDA party that would be in a position to win the seat. We have sent two observers to the constituency and we will decide after getting their report,” said LJP state chief Pashupati Kumar Paras. “Since the RJD has supported CPI(M), it is not necessary that the LJP will also support the CPI(M),” he added.