 "Lok Sabha elections: Can Rashtriya Janata Dal break the Pataliputra jinx?")
Four years back, the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and its allies won all six Assembly constituencies within the Pataliputra Lok Sabha seat in Bihar, where the RJD’s Misa Bharti has again challenged Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s Ram Kripal Yadav.
She would hope, given the RJD-led alliance’s influence on the Assembly constituencies, for a result different from what she and her father, Lalu Prasad, have faced ever since the seat was created in 2009.
Bharti is currently a Rajya Sabha member. She lost to Ram Kripal, known as RJD founder Lalu Prasad’s ‘Hanuman’ until he parted ways with him a decade back, by slim margins, of nearly 4 per cent of the votes polled, in both 2014 and 2019. The seat has not been lucky for the family since it was created after the 2008 delimitation. In 2009, Lalu Prasad lost to Janata Dal (United)’s Ranjan Prasad Yadav, his one-time confidante, by 23,541 votes.
Ram Kripal was an MP from the Patna Lok Sabha seat in 1993, 1996, and 2004, which was abolished after the delimitation, and fell out with Lalu Prasad in 2014 when he decided to field his daughter Misa from the newly created Pataliputra seat.
According to locals, Ram Kripal is accessible while Misa is not. However, Ram Kripal’s star has waned in the BJP just as that of Ujiarpur MP Nityanand Rai has risen. Ram Kripal was a Union minister in the first Narendra Modi government, but dropped in the second even as Rai became the BJP’s Yadav face in 2019. In contrast, Tejashwi Yadav has galvanised the RJD rank and file, and his plank of ensuring government jobs has struck a chord among the youth.