About 2.58 lakh voters of Harlakhi Assembly constituency will elect their new MlA on Saturday. Basant Kushwaha of Rashtriya lok Samata Party (RlSP) had been elected in November 2015 election but the debutant legislator died a day before taking the membership of the House. This reduced the strength of RlSP from two to one.
There are nine candidates in the fray for the bypoll. They include deceased Kushwaha’s son Sudhanshu Shekhar, Mohammad Shabbir of Congress who lost the election three months back with a margin of about 4,000 votes and CPI’s Ram Naresh Pandey.
However, neither NDA nor Mahagathbandhan leaders took much interest in this polls. Only RJD supremo lalu Prasad and some State Congress leaders campaigned but neither Chief Minister Nitish Kumar nor State JD(U) president Bashistha Narain Singh visited the constituency giving an indication that the party was not very happy with Congress party’s attitude. “Nitish was not well and I was away from Bihar. But I deployed the party cadres to work for the Mahagathbandhan candidate,” Singh said.
Initially, sources said, JD(U) wanted to field its own candidate there but had to step back following forceful claim of the Congress. In 2010 election JD(U) had won this seat but during 2015 polls the party sacrificed its claim in favour of Congress.
From the NDA side apart from RlSP chief and Union Minister Upendra Kushwaha, lJP supremo Ram Vilas Paswan and Bihar BJP leader Sushil Kumar Modi did roadshow there.
The Congress sources said its candidate Shabbir lost because of the presence of a rebel RJD candidate Ramashish Yadav who garnered 21,670 votes. Congress won 27 seats in the November polls.
State Congress chief and Education Minister Ashok Chaudhary who extensively campaigned in the constituency in Madhubani district was confident that the party would win bypoll hands down the Congress since 1951 won this seat six times till 1990. “We are all set to increase our tally,” he claimed. On the other hand the CPI, which too won this seat six times has made all efforts to wrest it. In the two Assembly polls held in 2005 CPI’s Ram Naresh Pandey won it and had been runner up three times.