In the midst of the Bihar Legislative Council elections, the ongoing tussle in the NDA seems to be intensifying. Vikas Insaan Party (VIP) chief Mukesh Sahni, who has been consistently showing his attitude to the BJP, suffered a major setback on Wednesday when all three MLAs of his party joined the BJP. Raju Singh, Mishri Lal and Savarn Singh left the VIP and joined the BJP. Bihar Assembly Speaker Vijay Kumar Sinha also gave recognition to the three MLAs.
VIP had only three MLAs, Mukesh Sahni himself is MLC. Both the Deputy Chief Ministers of the state Tarkishore Prasad and Renu Devi and the three MLAs of the VIP party have met the Speaker of the Bihar Assembly. Now only Mukesh Sahni is left as the leader of the VIP in the Bihar Legislative Assembly, who is a member of the Legislative Council. The important thing is that he too has only a few weeks left in his term.
Mukesh Sahni is currently a member of NDA and Minister of Animal Husbandry in Nitish Kumar’s government. In the Bihar Legislative Council elections, he announced to field a candidate against the BJP while staying with the NDA. For the past few weeks, he was having a fierce tussle with the BJP. Even in the UP elections, VIPs had fielded candidates against the BJP. Before these three MLAs joined the BJP, another VIP member Amar Paswan joined the Rashtriya Janata Dal. Amar Paswan was supposed to be the candidate for the by-election to the Bochahan assembly seat on April 12, but he switched sides hours before the party made the announcement.
Mukesh Sahni had also fielded candidates on 53 seats in the 2022 UP assembly elections. At present, elections are being held on 24 seats of the Legislative Council in Bihar from the local body quota. VIP had announced support to NDA allies in 15 seats, of which 11 are JD(U) accounts, while it has also announced support to BJP in three seats. It was decided to support RLJP (Lok Janshakti Party- Ram Vilas) on one seat and VIP himself is contesting on nine seats.