NEW DELHI/PATNA: After few hiccups and some hard bargaining, the BJP finally appears to have stitched together a seat-sharing deal for next month’s Bihar polls. An announcement is likely this evening, say sources.
At a meeting late last night, BJP President Amit Shah managed to convince Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) chief Ram Vilas Paswan that parties should contest seats where they have a strong base. Ms Paswan, sources say, agreed to tone down his demand to 40-odd seats.
Mr #AmitShah also held final seat-sharing talks with two other allies, former chief minister #JitanRam Manjhi of the Hindustan Awam Morcha (HAM) and union minister Upendra Kushwaha of the Rashtriya Lok Samata Party (#RLSP) this morning. Both had earlier announced that they would agree to a just decision on seat-sharing by the BJP chief.
Sources say that the broad seat-sharing formula arrived at gives the BJP nearly 160 seats to contest while the allies get the rest – 70-odd seats – of the 243 seats in the state.
Before the possible announcement today, Mr Shah met top BJP leaders. He is later expected to meet all party MPs from Bihar.
Sources say the BJP wants a larger chunk of the seats so that it is assured of winning a comfortable majority of 122 on its own and reducing its dependence on the partners. While the party, sources say, is not worried about Mr Paswan’s LJP – should the rival Nitish Kumar-Lalu Prasad combine manages to win seats close to the half-way mark – it had its doubts about both Mr Manjhi and Mr Kushwaha in the post-poll scenario.
The BJP’s top leadership, sources say, worked though the night to arrive at an acceptable seat-sharing formula which involved hectic negotiations with allies.
Eventually, BJP’s chief negotiator and union minister Ananth Kumar managed to persuade the allies to scale down their demands and settle for lesser number of seats.
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