Dispute Over Seat Sharing Threatens Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) in Bihar

The Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) in Bihar might be destroyed by the dispute over seat sharing for the Lok Sabha elections, since the Congress and the CPIML are unwilling to give up any more ground to its more powerful partner, the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD).

Even while there are signs that the Congress's membership will be decided upon on Wednesday night, the CPIML dispute may take longer to resolve.

"The RJD has agreed that our party would run for nine of the state's 40 seats. Our party's national election committee has an evening meeting set in Delhi. After it's finished, we could announce the seats we want to run for," Congress spokesman Anand Madhab told The Telegraph.

From its original demand for 15 Lok Sabha seats in Bihar, the Congress has now backed down. In the 2019 general elections, it ran for nine seats with the RJD and the Left parties as part of the Mahagathbandhan coalition.

The dispute over the Purnea seat, nevertheless, may cause problems for the timeline of seat allocation. Former Member of Parliament Rajesh Ranjan, well known as Pappu Yadav, is determined to get straight into the election fight after merging his Jan Adhikar Party (Loktantrik) with the Congress.

However, former minister Bima Bharti, who left chief leader Nitish Kumar's Janata Dal United (JDU) to join it, has been granted a ticket for the seat by the RJD. If Pappu is forced to go to the Madhepura or Supaul seats, which he and his wife Ranjeet Ranjan have previously represented, the impasse could be overcome.

A like circumstance has arisen with the Aurangabad seat, which was once regarded as a stronghold of the Congress party. Nikhil Kumar, the party's senior leader and a former governor of Kerala and Nagaland, had indicated his intention to run from that seat. But RJD head Lalu Prasad recently gave its emblem to Abhay Kushwaha, who had lately left the JDU.

By the way, the RJD has already given out tickets for around 20 of the 40 available seats without having a formal agreement with the allies to share seats. The partners in India are irate about this.

The RJD is only sparing three Lok Sabha seats—Bhojpur, Karakat, and Nalanda—in exchange for the CPIML's eight seats, which it had requested to contest. Despite demonstrating a readiness to compromise, the Left party intends to run for at least the Siwan seat, drawing candidates from a total of four seats.

"For us, one of the important seats is Siwan. Decades of fight by our party have resulted in the death of numerous of our leaders and members, including Chandrashekhar, the former head of the JNU Students Union. allocated our strike rate in the 2020 Assembly elections, we should be allocated more than three seats. Twelve of the 19 Assembly seats that we had run for and won were won by us, CPIML spokesman Kumar Parvez informed this publication.

The Congress has just 19 MLAs, hence a number of top CPIML politicians are also against the party receiving nine Lok Sabha seats.