Why a family fight is holding up seat-sharing talks in Bihar for BJP-led NDA

The Hajipur Lok Sabha, represented eight times by Chirag Paswan’s late father Ram Vilas Paswan was the bone of contention between the two LJP factions

The fresh fight over the Hajipur Lok Sabha seat between Chirag Paswan and his uncle Pashupati Nath Paras, who lead separate factions of the former Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) founded by Ram Vilas Paswan, threatened to upset the calculations of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA), which was emboldened by the return of Nitish Kumar to the fold in January this year.

Pashupati Paras (left) and Chirag Paswan (right) (File Photos)

After hectic parleys, the seat-sharing for 40 Lok Sabha seats in Bihar seems to have been finalised after the meeting of LJP (RV) leader Chirag Paswan with BJP national president JP Nadda on Wednesday evening.

“As a member of the NDA, today in a meeting with BJP National President Hon Shri @jpnadda ji, we have together finalised the seat sharing in Bihar for the ensuing Lok Sabha polls. The same will be announced in due course,” wrote Chirag Paswan on X after the meeting.

The knotty issue of Hajipur seems to have been resolved. But why is Hajipur, where Chirag’s uncle, Pashupati Paras, is the sitting MP, such a hot-button issue?

The year after the death of former Union minister Ram Vilas Paswan in October 2020, saw the beginning of the disintegration of the Lok Janshakti Party (LJP), founded by Paswan in 2000 after splitting from the Janata Dal. Nobody thought that the party would split within a year over an intense ownership battle between two factions, one headed by Ram Vilas Paswan’s son Chirag and the other by his younger brother and Chirag’s uncle Pashupati Nath Paras, who led the rebellion.

In June 2021, Pashupati Paras orchestrated a coup against Chirag after the rift between the two widened. Paras had four of the six LJP Lok Sabha members of Parliament (MP) with him and was later inducted into the Narendra Modi cabinet, while Chirag was left out.

The four LJP MPs – Mehboob Ali Kaiser (Khagaria), Veena Devi (Vaishali), Prince Raj (Samastipur) and Chandan Singh (Nawada) – joined hands to nominate Pashupati (Hajipur) as their leader in the Lok Sabha. Losing no time, Pashupati – for whom Ram Vilas had vacated the Hajipur seat after nursing it for his entire political life – led all the MPs to meet the Lok Sabha speaker, Om Birla, and request him to treat them as a ‘separate group’. The rebel LJP MPs ‘expelled’ Chirag from all posts of the party.

The Chirag faction convened a national executive meeting in which all five MPs of the Paras faction were removed from the primary membership of the party.

The year-long bitter political war over the ownership of late Ram Vilas Paswan’s LJP between his son and his brother came to an end in October 2021 with the Election Commission of India allocated separate names and symbols to both warring leaders. While the ECI allotted the ‘Ram Vilas’ tag to Chirag, Paras got the ‘Rashtriya’ prefix for his faction. The split means that there is now a freeze on the Lok Janshakti Party’s name and its party symbol – a bungalow.

The EC allotted the name ‘Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas)’ for Chirag’s group and gave it the symbol ‘Helicopter’, while to Paras group, the Commission allotted the name ‘Rashtriya Lok Janshakti Party’ with ‘Sewing Machine’ as its election symbol.

It is said that the factional fights and subsequent split in the LJP were engineered from behind the scenes by Janata Dal (United) leader and Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar. The JD(U) alleged that Chirag played a dirty role in ensuring the defeat of its candidates during the 2020 assembly polls, reducing JD(U) to 43 MLAs in the Bihar assembly. Chirag was critical of Nitish’s governance while Paras supported him. The Pashupati-led group has reposed faith in Nitish’s leadership.

The recent confrontation between Chirag and Paras arose after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) again started promoting Chirag in the run-up to the assembly by-polls in 2022. Chirag is said to have played an active role in BJP’s win.

Buoyed by the BJP’s support Chirag, MP for Jamui, has staked his claim to the Hajipur Lok Sabha seat in the upcoming general election, which his late father represented eight times. Paras won this seat in 2019 when Ram Vilas Paswan was still alive, while Chirag fought successfully from Jamui. Chirag’s claim to Hajipur has now irked Paras to no end. He announced that he would not leave that seat, but would continue to be with the BJP-led NDA.