Patna: The ‘Grand Alliance’ in Bihar has given just one constituency to the Left parties in the upcoming Lok Sabha polls. And after that happened, the CPI has not wasted any time in nominating JNU students union president Kanhaiya Kumar from the Begusarai seat.
Initially indications were that Kumar may contest on a Congress ticket. But as that did not happen, the CPI has decided to nominate the firebrand leader to contest from the Begusarai Lok Sabha seat.
The ‘Grand Alliance’ in Bihar had announced Friday the seat sharing arrangement for the 40 Lok Sabha constituencies. As per the agreement, Lalu Prasad Yadav’s RJD will nominate candidates for 20 seats, the Congress nine, the Rashtriya Lok Samta Party (RSLP) in five constituencies and the Jitan Ram Manjhi-led HAM-S three seats. The Vikasheel Insaaf Party has got three seats and the CPI-ML (Liberation) one from the RJD quota.
However, it is not clear whether the CPI will contest from one seat only. The party gave enough indications Saturday that it may contest from other seats also.
“The final call has already been taken on Kanhaiya Kumar,” said the Bihar CPI secretary Satyanarayan Singh. ‘We have called a meeting Sunday to decide on the number of seats we will contest from,” he added. Chances are that at places it can be a three-cornered contest between the NDA, the Grand Alliance and the CPI.
Begusarai will certainly be a three-way contest as NDA’s Giriraj Singh, RJD’s Tanveer Hassan and Kumar are in fray. It should be stated here that both Tanveer and Kumar are residents of this constituency.
In the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, Bhola Singh had defeated Tanveer by a margin of more than 58,000 votes.
Agencies