Bihar Election Results: Rashtriya Janata Dal leads the board with more than 60 seats.
New Delhi:
The unexpectedly low numbers of the opposition-led alliance of Rashtriya Janata Dal, Congress and left-wing parties have been illuminated by the good performance of the PCI (ML). The marginalized left unit, which is competing big for the first time, currently leads with 12 seats, just behind 20 in Congress. The Rashtriya Janata Dal leads the board with more than 60 seats.
“Congress is the main responsibility of the opposition alliance, not the left,” author and columnist Ajay Bose told NDTV.
The CPI (ML), which had a Naxal past, had an association with the Rashtriya Janata Dal and in this election it was allocated seats from the RJD quota. The party is contesting 19 seats in this election, the rest of the seats in the Left bloc have been for the CPI and CPIML.
Describing the alliance as a “great achievement,” Bose said: “It is a great leap for the CPIML to have an alliance with Lalu’s party, which has been responsible for some of the most cowardly attacks on the far left.”
It shows how far the party has come politically, he said.
At the height of Mandal’s politics, backed by the majority of political leaders in Bihar who were tempered by the JP movement, the class politics of the CPI and CPM had been integrated into the caste politics of the RJD. But the CPI (ML) had still managed to maintain its base, which has helped it in the current elections.
Speaking of the left’s high strike rate, Bose said it only shows that among the poor, the marginalized, and the lower castes, the CPIML and individual candidates “have some credibility,” but they never got a chance to list their performance because they never had an alliance to compete in the mainstream.
Tracing the genesis of the alliance, Dipankar Bhattacharya, the CPIML general secretary had previously told NDTV that the RJD and the CPI (ML) had an unspoken before the 2019 elections and backed the RJD in four Lok Sabha seats. .
In three of those seats, the opposition candidates obtained more than 4 billion votes. The CPI (ML) candidates in Arah and Bhojpur had obtained more than 4 lakhs of votes.
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