The desperate eagerness of Bihar’s marginalised satraps Lalu Prasad Yadav and Ram Vilas Paswan to get the Congress party’s favours has pushed their two-year-old alliance into danger. Competitive angling for a ministerial berth at the Centre is believed to be at the root of the two parties’ sudden disregard for their alliance.
After the RJD, freshly spurned by the Congress, unilaterally declared its support for the CPI(M) in the Purnea Assembly bypoll, a sulking LJP retaliated by announcing its support for the Congress candidate there. While both the parties dismiss their individual decisions as no pointer at any major rift, analysts and sections within the three parties involved read the developments as mutually and terminally ruinous for the two Bihar-based parties. Mr Paswan, who had turned into a pariah in Bihar’s mainstream politics even worse placed than Mr Yadav following their alliance’s rout in both the 2009 LS polls and the 2010 Assembly polls, was helped by Mr Yadav when the dalit leader and former Union minister entered the RS with the RJD’s support in June 2010. That elevation had brought Bihar’s tallest dalit leader out of a yearlong political wilderness and made him grateful to Mr Yadav, with whom he has had a long love-hate relationship.
But soon after Mr Paswan’s entry into the RS and his growing activities as a senior member of the Upper House, speculations had started about he trying hard to acquire a berth in the Congress-led Union government by extending support to the Congress, especially its badly injured Bihar unit. But the Congress continued snubbing him and Mr Yadav, whose party currently has four MPs in the LS while Paswan’s LJP has none.
By extending support to the Congress for the Purnea bypoll, slated for Saturday, Mr Paswan is understood to have sent out two political messages — that his alliance with Mr Yadav is now negotiable and that he is open to enter into a greater partnership with the Congress at the national level in exchange for a central ministerial berth.