PATNA: All eyes are set on Bihar assembly speaker Vijay Kumar Sinha against whom ruling RJD members have moved 'no trust motion', likely to be taken up in case he does not resign by August 24 when the RJD-led grand alliance or Mahagathbandhan government goes for a floor test.
According to the rule, a Speaker can be removed from office by a resolution of the Assembly passed by a majority. While the seven constituents of the RJD-led Mahagathbandhan have a total of 164 members in the Assembly, the BJP has 77 MLAs.
The outgoing state legislative council chairman Awadhesh Narayan Singh has also not resigned from his post so far. Meanwhile, RJD and JD (U) have reached a consensus on the names of the Bihar assembly speaker and state legislative council chairman.
While veteran RJD leader Awadh Bihari Choudhary is likely to be assembly speaker, Devesh Chandra Thakur most probably will be the next state legislative council chairman.
Choudhary as RJD candidate had defeated his BJP rival and former party MP Om Prakash Yadav from Siwan in the last assembly election. A five-time RJD MLA from Siwan, Choudhary had also contested for the post of assembly speaker after the last assembly election but he was defeated by the BJP candidate Sinha.
Election for the post of speaker was also surrounded by a controversy when former deputy chief minister Sushil Kumar Modi had shared a one-and-a-half-minute-long clip on his official Twitter handle. In the audio-tape, the RJD chief is purportedly trying to persuade a BJP legislator to abstain from the vote.
JD (U) is the single largest party in the Bihar legislative council and Devesh Chandra Thakur is nominated as a candidate for the Bihar legislative council chairman, he is tipped to become the next chairman of the upper house.
Thakur had won the MLC election as an Independent candidate from Tirhut graduate constituency in 2002. In 2004, he joined JD (U). Later, he again emerged victorious in the MLC election from Tirhut graduate constituency in 2008.
Same year, Thakur was made state disaster management minister in the Nitish Kumar cabinet. In 2014, he again entered into the upper house as an Independent member while he had won MLC election from Tirhut graduate constituency for one more time in 2020. So, it is his fourth term in the state legislative council.