Nitish’s reign ends in Bihar, BJP to get a chief minister
JD(U) patriarch Nitish Kumar filed nomination for the Rajya Sabha from Bihar on Thursday. He is likely to step down as the Chief Minister of the State by April 10, 2026, sources said. As Bihar’s longest-serving Chief Minister for nearly a quarter century, Nitish had earned reputation as Sushan Babu, despite his shifting political alignments.
His nomination was kept a secret by the NDA, anticipating resentment from within the JD(U). Kumar filed his nominations flanked by Home Minister Amit Shah, and the newly elected BJP president, Nitin Nabin, who also filed his nomination for the upper house of the Parliament.
With the NDA now facing backlash from JD(U) workers, the BJP has a major challenge in Bihar to ‘install’ a CM. As the single largest constituent of the alliance in the State, the BJP is likely to put up its own candidate as the CM, which will be a first for the party in the State. Among the names doing the rounds for the CM’s post is Samrat Choudhary, whom Union minister Shah, the BJP’s principal strategist, had vowed to make “a big man,” during the Assembly poll campaign, and Shah’s deputy in the Union Council of Ministers, Nityanand Rai.
The JD(U) leadership has pressed for an ordinary person as the CM to balance the management if Nitish’s son Nishant Kumar who has just forayed in active politics is appointed as deputy CM to counter the resentment from and within the JD(U).
Besides Nitish and Nabin, other NDA candidates who filed RS nominations from the State were Union Minister Ram Nath Thakur of the JD(U), RLM president Upendra Kushwaha, and BJP state general secretary Shivesh Kumar, a former MLA who hopes to make a debut in Parliament. NDA enjoys a brute majority in the Assembly, though its tally of 202 in the 243-member House falls three short of the number needed to bag all five Rajya Sabha seats.
RJD national working president, Tejashwi Yadav, the Leader of the Opposition in the Assembly, said, “BJP has done a Maharashtra in Bihar. It is a party that has always been opposed to Dalits and OBCs. Now, it will seek to implement its agenda in the socialist stronghold.”
In Bihar, nomination papers were also filed by RJD’s Amarendra Dhari Singh, a sitting MP and businessman turned politician, who was accompanied, among others, by the party’s national working president, Tejashwi Yadav, to the Vidhan Sabha secretariat.
The RJD hold two of the five Rajya Sabha seats from Bihar for which polls are being held. But in view of its decimation in the 2025 Assembly polls, in which it managed only 25 seats, it has chosen to contest only one, dropping Prem Chand Gupta, a former Union minister and key aide of party supremo Lalu Prasad.
