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BJP to contest 50 per cent seats in Bihar, its allies the rest

Tara Shankar Sahay in New Delhi

The Bharatiya Janata Party will fight 50 per cent of the seats in the impending Bihar assembly polls. It will leave the other 50 per cent to be shared between its allies the Samata Party, the Janata Dal-United and the Bihar People's Party, according to highly-placed party sources. The state Vidhan Sabha has 324 seats.

The sources told rediff.com that despite the various claims and counter-claims of the constituents of the National Democratic Alliance regarding their participation in the state assembly polls, all of them were reconciled to the fact that "united we stand and divided we fall." They said the BJP, the Samata Party and the JD knew the importance of preventing Laloo Prasad Yadav's Rashtriya Janata Dal retaining power in the state.

"There is nothing wrong in the National Democratic Alliance constituents continuing the dialogue to finalise seat-sharing arrangements among them. So what if they give the impression of bargaining? A good haggle is always healthy, more so in politics," the sources pointed out.

It is understood that out of the 50 per cent seats earmarked for the non-BJP NDA constituents, the Samata Party is deadset on contesting 120 seats. With the BJP's determination to fight around 160 seats, the remaining 44 in the House of 324 would be divided between the JD and the JPP.

The quarrel among the JD-U constituents has forced the BJP chief Kushabhau Thakre to try and sort out the differences among them. Even prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee has been apprised of the matter and he had a meeting yesterday with the Samata Party leader and Union Agriculture Minister Nitish Kumar. Significantly, it was Nitish Kumar who insisted that the Samata should not merge with the JD-U.

The fissures in the ranks of the JD-U over the seat-sharing arrangements for the Bihar assembly polls had forced the BJP leadership to come out with a plausible explanation. Senior BJP vice-president Jagdish Prasad Mathur yesterday explained that since the three main contenders in Bihar -- the BJP, Samata Party and the JD-U -- were fighting the polls on their own symbols, there could not be any common manifesto and that this should not cause any surprise. However, he clarified that there was no harm in carrying out a joint campaign by the three parties.

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