Bihar minister Mukesh Sahani, who has raised a banner of revolt against the BJP, on Wednesday received a massive setback when all three MLAs elected on the ticket of his Vikassheel Insaan Party (VIP) jumped ship and merged with the BJP.
Mr Sahani was blindsided on a day he was busy helping his party candidate Geeta Devi file nomination papers for by-election to the Bochahan assembly seat which has fallen vacant upon the death of VIP MLA Musafir Paswan.
The day also marked the filing of nominations by the two other significant candidates – BJP's Baby Kumari and RJD's Amar Paswan, who is the son of the late Bochahan MLA and changed sides after realising that the VIP chief was faced with an insurmountable political crisis.
In the evening, Swarna Singh, Mishri Lal Yadav and Raju Kumar Singh, all of them elected in 2020 as VIP candidates, met Speaker Vijay Kumar Sinha informing him that they wished to be merged with the BJP.
The speaker issued the notification in this regard, thereby making the BJP the largest in the assembly in terms of numerical strength. The party now has 77 MLAs, two more than Lalu Prasad's RJD, the principal opposition party.
Emerging from the speaker's chamber, the MLAs told reporters that they were "returning to their home" as they had all been previously associated with the BJP. They also said that Sahani's confrontational stance towards the BJP was "suicidal".
Mr Sahani, a former Bollywood set designer, had floated his party in November 2018 and joined the RJD-led Grand Alliance soon afterward but left just ahead of the 2020 assembly polls, alleging that leader of the opposition Tejashwi Yadav was giving him a raw deal in sharing of seats.
He was inducted into the NDA at the instance of the BJP after a meeting with Union Home Minister Amit Shah. In the elections, his party won four seats though Sahani lost his own. Nonetheless, the BJP backed him and helped him earn a place in the Nitish Kumar cabinet.
However, he seemed to have entered his formidable former patron's bad books after his foray into the Uttar Pradesh elections where the inexperienced politician contested around 50 seats and virulently attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath.
He tied himself into more knots by fielding candidates against the BJP in seven legislative council seats where polls are due next month and failed to see the writing on the wall when the saffron party struck back, unilaterally announcing Baby Kumari's candidature in an obvious snub to Sahani.
The NDA in Bihar also includes Chief Minister Nitish Kumar's JD(U) and ex-CM Jitan Ram Manjhi's Hindustani Awam Morcha (HAM).
JD(U) sources have indicated that they treated the crisis as "a matter between BJP and Sahani" and the HAM, a small outfit with four MLAs, is expected to follow the same line.
The minister, who holds fishery and animal husbandry portfolio, finds himself in a quandary as his own term in the legislative council where he won a seat vacated by a BJP MLC ends in July.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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