Will Jitan Ram Manjhi manage to defeat Uday Narayan Choudhary, Shobha Sinha in Imamganj?
Former Bihar chief minister and the president of Hindustan Awam Morcha (Secular) Jitan Ram Manjhi is seeking a re-election from Imamganj. Uday Narayan Choudhary, a veteran Dalit leader and former Bihar assembly speaker, has been pitted from the seat as a candidate from the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD). Chirag Paswan-led Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) has fielded Shobha Sinha, the daughter-in-law of Ramswaroop Pawan, a former MLA from Imamganj.
Manjhi, who recently came back to the NDA fold, is the senior-most Dalit face in the National Democratic Alliance after the death of former Union minister Ram Vilas Paswan. Dalits in Bihar are over 16 per cent of the electorate and about 40 seats in the 243-member house are reserved for them, and in such a scenario Manjhi's comeback could be an advanbtage for the ruling alliance.
Last month, Manjhi had quit the RJD-led Grand Alliance after claiming that he was ignored by the rest of the gathbandhan. Manjhi is a veteran politician who served as minister in the past governments of Congress, RJD as well as in Nitish Kumar's earlier NDA ministries in the state, has won assembly elections for a number of times since 1980.
Uday Narayan Choudhary used to be a staunch loyalist of chief minister Nitish Kumar until they fell apart in 2017 after the latter aligned with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). He has won the seat four times before losing to Manjhi in 2015.
The defeat at the hands of Manjhi had come as a big humiliation for Choudhary, both of them former loyalists of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, who shared an acrimonious relationship since the days they were in the JD(U).
Meanwhile, LJP candidate Shobha Sinha's father-in-law Ramswaroop Paswan had been a former Imamganj MLA who had, incidentally, won the seat by inflicting a defeat on Choudhary many years ago.
Sinha has also been playing the local versus outsider card to the hilt, underscoring the fact that she and her family belong to Imamganj, which is in crying need for progress, unlike Choudhary who hails from Patna and Manjhi who has his roots in a far-off part of Gaya.
