Patna: In October 2021, former Union minister Pashupati Kumar Paras was one of the vital sought-after politicians in Bihar. Low-profile till two months earlier than that, it was solely after he engineered a cut up within the Lok Janshakti Party (LJP), a celebration based by his late brother Ram Vilas Paswan, that he was courted by a number of events.
The Janata Dal (United) needed him in its nook seemingly to ship a message to Paswan’s son Chirag, who precipitated a big dent within the occasion’s votes within the 2020 meeting election, whereas the BJP wasted no time in inducting him into the National Democratic Alliance council of ministers.
Today, he cuts a lonesome determine. The BJP has struck a seat-sharing cope with nephew and challenger Chirag forward of the Lok Sabha polls — a transfer that has precipitated Paras, an MP from Bihar’s Haijpur, to step down because the Union minister for meals processing industries in protest.
Not even the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), the arch-rival of the Nitish Kumar-led authorities within the state, seems to need him.
“Paras ji is like an empty box. There is nothing inside. Forget the Paswans, he will not even get any votes from his own family,” Sunil Kumar Singh, an RJD MLC and shut aide of occasion chief Lalu Prasad Yadav, advised ThePrint.
It was the RJD’s providing of eight Lok Sabha seats to Chirag’s occasion Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas) that had reportedly precipitated the BJP to shortly shut the cope with the occasion.
“The RJD is not a party that believes in trying to rehabilitate spent forces,” Singh added.
This political unmooring may additionally result in Paras shedding 4 of the 5 MPs that sided with him when the LJP splintered in 2021. Three sitting MPs, Chandan Singh, brother of bahubali politician Surajbhan Singh, Choudhary Mehboob Ali Kaiser, and Veena Devi are rumoured to be looking for Lok Sabha tickets from the RJD.
The fourth, Samastipur MP Prince Raj, son of Ram Vilas Paswan’s different brother Ram Chandra Paswan who had joined Paras’s camp in 2021, seems to have hit a significant political roadblock — Chirag has made it clear that he wouldn’t give Lok Sabha tickets to those that rebelled towards him.
According to N.Okay. Chaudhary, a political analyst and former visiting professor of economics at Bihar’s Patna University, Paras has fallen sufferer to the “natural political instinct of survival of the fittest”.
“If BJP has preferred Chirag over Paras, it means that the party has more faith in Chirag. The BJP is doing this at the national level… It has nothing to do with political ideology,” he stated.
For now, Paras and his Rashtriya Lok Janshakti Party (RJLP) are weighing their choices. “We will be deciding our future course soon,” its spokesperson, Lalan Chandravanshi, stated.
On its half, the BJP denies betraying Paras. However, it additionally admits that political compulsions compelled it to choose Chirag.
“We could not have ignored Chirag, who campaigned for our candidates in the bypolls (in December),” Bihar BJP spokesperson Prem Ranjan Patel stated. “On the other hand, Paras ji’s support was limited to making statements. It was clear that the Paswan section of Dalits recognised Chirag and not Paras as the inheritor of late Ram Vilas Paswan’s political legacy.”
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What BJP’s transfer means for Paras
According to the caste survey performed in Bihar final yr, Dalits make up virtually 20 % of the inhabitants within the state. Various different estimates put Paswans, a Dalit subcaste that stood solidly behind Ram Vilas Paswan, at 6 % of Bihar’s voting inhabitants.
According to BJP sources, the occasion, which has been making an attempt to play on Bihar’s caste arithmetic, had made unsuccessful makes an attempt at a rapprochement between Paras and Chirag. However, each leaders needed Hajipur parliamentary seat, Ram Vilas Paswan’s citadel and Paras’s present seat, the sources added.
When Chirag threatened to drag out of seat-sharing talks, the BJP determined to let Paras go, one senior BJP chief from the state who didn’t want to be named advised ThePrint.
For Paras, the most recent growth may probably imply a return to relative political obscurity. A seven-time MLA who received his first meeting election in 1977 and a former minister within the Nitish Kumar-led Bihar authorities, Paras largely remained in Ram Vilas Paswan’s shadow, primarily serving as a go-between Nitish and the LJP chief.
Chirag’s entry and rising significance in LJP appeared to sideline him additional — for example, Ram Vilas Paswan endorsed Paras’s candidature for the 2019 common election from Hajipur solely after he was sure that his son Chirag would clinch the Jamui parliamentary seat.
“Despite his long political innings, Paras’s only identity was that he was Ram Vilas Paswan’s brother,” JD(U) chief and former MP Ranjan Prasad Yadav stated, including that the LJP founder took nice care of his members of the family again of their village in Bihar’s Khagaria district.
In June 2021, practically a yr after Paswan’s dying from extended sickness, Paras rebelled towards his nephew, declaring that 5 of the six LJP MPs had been with him. The transfer precipitated the occasion to separate into two factions.
For Chirag, who’s seen as a higher crowd-puller than his uncle, the BJP’s resolution to seemingly decide him over his uncle signifies triumph after two years.
According to the senior BJP chief quoted earlier, “The bottom line is that Paras brings nothing to the table. Chirag does.”
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)
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