With a stellar role in NDA's win in Bihar, the Bharatiya Janata Party is celebrating the triumph with great zeal. The BJP won 74 seats to power the NDA go past the halfway mark of 122 in the 243-chair Assembly. The JDU secured 43 seats. Other NDA partners Vikassheel Insaan Party (VIP) and former Bihar Chief Minister Jitan Ram Manjhi's Hindustani Awam Morcha (HAM) won four seats each.
The Rashtriya Janata Dal led by Lalu Prasad's son Tejashwi Yadav also powered the party to the status of the single largest party with 75 seats. But its alliance partner, Congress appeared to be the weak link and restricted the alliance from gaining majority. The Congress won only 19 of the 70 seats it contested.
'So near, yet so far'
But in terms of vote share, the outcome was a case of so near, yet so far for the RJD.
Although the RJD secured 23.11% votes highest by any party, it couldn't convert this into numbers. The BJP got 19.46% votes. Nitish Kumar's JDU secured 15.39% votes, the third largest party while the Congress was a distant fourth with 9.48% votes.
The difference between the total votes polled for NDA and grand alliance was just 12,768. While the NDA polled 1,57,01,226 votes, the Mahagathbandh pocketed 1,56,88,458 votes.
In terms of percentage, the NDA was just 0.3% percent ahead of the opposition's alliance. The NDA got 37.26% against the grand alliance's 37.23%.
In 2015, then Mahagathbandhan of the RJD-Congress-JDU got 1,59,52,188 votes. The NDA, comprising the BJP, LJP, HAM and RLSP, had secured 1,29,90,645 votes. The difference in the vote share was over 7.8 per cent five years ago.
