New Delhi:JD(U) chief and former chief minister Nitish Kumar met Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday at his office in the Parliament House complex, which he described as a “courtesy call”. The meeting comes a day after the BJP faced an embarrassing defeat in Bihar’s Bankipur bypoll, where Jan Suraaj Party (JSP) founder Prashant Kishor, in his electoral debut, defeated the BJP in its stronghold by more than 18,000 votes. The NDA described the Bankipur Assembly bypoll results as “contrary to expectations”; the BJP ordered a review.
“Rajya Sabha MP Shri @NitishKumar Ji met PM @narendramodi earlier today,” the Prime Minister’s Office said in a post on X.
The chief said he paid a courtesy call on the Prime Minister. Kumar, a Rajya Sabha MP, was accompanied by JD(U) leaders and Union minister Rajiv Ranjan Singh and Rajya Sabha MP and national working president Sanjay Kumar Jha during his meeting with the Prime Minister.
While the BJP’s top brass has sought a detailed report regarding the debacle from its Bihar unit, there is rumbling in the party after the bypoll loss. Some in the BJP are blaming “complacency”; others are citing “arrogance” among the state leaders as the reason behind the breach of the party’s “bastion”. There is also a view within the party that the election managers “did not take the bypoll seriously.”
The Bankipur byelection was the first major test for the saffron party after it got its first chief minister in Bihar, where Kumar was at the helm for over two decades. A section within the BJP feels that the leadership’s “choice of its first CM” to succeed Kumar was also one of the reasons for the loss. A section within the BJP also sees the mandate as a disapproval of CM Samrat Choudhary’s leadership. Choudhary succeeded Kumar in April after the former was nominated to the Upper House of Parliament.
JD(U) MLA and strongman Anant Singh blamed the leadership change for the loss and maintained that result could have been different if Kumar had remained the chief minister.
After the bypoll defeat, questions are also being raised over the candidate selection by the party leadership in a constituency with a sizeable youth vote. BJP had fielded Neeraj Kumar Sinha after its earlier candidate Abhishek Kumar withdrew from the electoral battle a day after the party announced his candidature. This also boosted Kishor’s chances as the JSP made it their campaigning issue.
For the BJP’s poll managers, the Bankipur result is worrying, as the constituency has nearly 45 per cent upper caste voters, considered the party’s core votebank. The anger among the youth over the UGC regulation issue and paper leak, coupled with the BJP-led NDA’s “dismal” report card on the jobs and law and order situation, is also being blamed for its poor performance. Some BJP leaders also blamed the “encounter” of a 28-year-old youth, Bharat Bhushan Tiwari, in June, which had sparked a massive outrage against the BJP-led NDA government.
With the Bankipur poll result suggesting anger among the upper-caste voters, the BJP leadership is worried about its implications on the upcoming Assembly polls scheduled early next year, also including in Uttar Pradesh.
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