BJP forms crack team for Bihar elections

Vibha Sharma

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Tribune News Service

New Delhi, June 7

Gearing up for the high-stake Bihar Assembly elections, the BJP has put together a crack team comprising the party’s top lieutenants — state in charge Bhupendra Yadav, Union Minister Dharmendra Pradhan and key RSS man and joint general secretary Saudan Singh.

However, the final strategy of the party for the elections will depend upon the configuration put by its two key opponents — regional satraps Lalu Prasad of the RJD and Nitish Kumar of the JD-U. This even though top leaders believe that their coming together would be “unnatural” keeping in mind the ground realities in the caste-divided state and their own personal ambitions.

What seems to be almost certain is the BJP may follow the Haryana-Jharkhand-Maharashtra model in Bihar. Having learnt a lesson the hard way in the Delhi Assembly elections, where the party paid a heavy price for projecting top cop Kiran Bedi as CM candidate, sources say it is unlikely that the experiment will be repeated in Bihar. Moreover, the general mandate within the party is in favour of “a cohesive leadership” rather than projecting a clear-cut leader and annoying others.

The party started preparing for Bihar soon after the general election. The move to appoint RS MP Bhupendra Yadav as Bihar in-charge was to cut into Lalu’s traditional vote base — the Yadavs.