Pawan, Nishant among 9 elected to Bihar Legislative Council

Bhojpuri superstar Pawan Singh, Bihar Health minister Nishant Kumar and BJP national media co-in-charge Sanjay Mayukh were among nine candidates who on Thursday were declared elected unopposed to the State Legislative Council.

Altogether eight candidates of the ruling NDA and one of the Opposition RJD had filed their nomination papers for nine seats of the Upper House, for which biennial elections were recently announced.

They all were handed over respective certificates of election after the time was up for withdrawal of nomination papers, said an official of the Vidhan Sabha secretariat. Besides, said the official, JD(U) candidate Lalan Saraf was declared elected, unopposed, to a seat where a by-election was announced as it fell vacant upon the resignation of party supremo and former Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, who is now a Rajya Sabha MP.

The BJP, which held two of the nine seats to which biennial polls were held, has now bagged four seats with the election of Singh, Mayukh, Anil Thakur and Sheela Pandit. While Singh, who had quit the party in 2024, only to return a year later, and Mayukh belong to the upper castes, the BJP’s traditional support base, Thakur and Pandit, both grassroots-level workers, come from extremely backward classes.

The JD(U) held four of these seats but contested only three in the biennial polls, and besides Nishant, who joined the party in March, two months before getting inducted into the cabinet, the remaining two MLC elects are Bharti Mehta and Shivrani Devi Prajapati.

Mehta is an EBC and one of the party’s spokespersons, while Prajapati, an OBC, is a former state general secretary of the JD(U).

Yet another NDA candidate to get elected was Ashraf Ansari of the Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas) headed by Union minister Chirag Paswan, who has rewarded a trusted aide of his late father Ram Vilas Paswan besides reaching out to the minorities. Ashraf becomes the first person to be elected to the legislative council from LJPRV, which came into being five years ago, following a split in the LJP founded by the late Paswan. Besides, RJD MLC Sunil Kumar Singh got elected for a third consecutive term, triggering a bit of heartburn in the opposition party headed by his mentor Lalu Prasad.

Former MLA Shiv Chandra Ram, who has been in political wilderness for quite a while, tearfully announced his resignation from the party upon being denied a legislative council ticket. However, his resignation has been turned down.

Except Pawan Singh, whose younger brother visited the Vidhan Sabha secretariat as his representative, all candidates turned up to receive their certificates in person.

Barring Sunil Singh and Sanjay Mayukh, both of whom shall enjoy a third consecutive term, all candidates make their Vidhan Parishad debut.

The current round of legislative council elections led to a bit of rumbling in the ruling NDA as minister Deepak Prakash, son of Rashtriya Lok Morcha president Upendra Kushwaha, was not considered for a ticket. Prakash is not a member of either House of the legislature, and unless he gets elected within six months of his induction in the cabinet last month, the 37-year-old may have to give up his ministerial berth.

Tejashwi mocks Nishant’s qualification

Patna: RJD national president Tejashwi Yadav on Thursday mocked the educational qualification of Health Minister Nishant Kumar, commenting that the Bihar education minister will surely make the JD(U) leader an engineer. Kumar, who was elected to the Legislative Council earlier in the day, had disclosed in his affidavit that at the Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, he had completed “five out of the eight prescribed semesters up to 2001.” The former CM Nitish Kumar’s son was earlier dubbed as an engineering graduate like his father. On the question of his qualification, Yadav sarcastically said, “I have full faith in Bihar’s education minister that he will make Nishant Ji an engineer. One individual has become a professor; the other can definitely become an engineer.” He was alluding to Bihar minister Ashok Choudhary, who formally became an assistant professor in February, and delivered his first lecture in political science at AN College in Patna the next month.