NEW DELHI: The Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) has called a meeting of its parliamentary board on Saturday evening in the national capital to decide on whether to accept the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance's (NDA) offer of seats in the upcoming Bihar Assembly elections.
According to the party's sources, it may be decided at the meeting that the LJP top brass, which is already unhappy with the NDA's offer, will they accept the offer or go ahead with its plan to fight on 143 constituencies in the Bihar elections.
Seat sharing tussle within the NDA is still on, however, the LJP is continuously attacking Janata Dal (United) (JDU) and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar. There are several reasons for this, firstly the LJP feels that Nitish Kumar has not given proper respect to an ally party LJP and its chief Chirag Paswan.
The third thing is recent security cover change in Bihar as Nitish Kumar government has revised VIP security.
According to the revised security arrangement, Hindustani Awam Morcha or HAM-S chief and Dalit leader Jitan Ram Manjhi has got Z plus security, a notch higher than the Z-category security cover enjoyed by his rival Dalit leader and LJP chief Ram Vilas Paswan. Manjhi earlier had Z-category security. Manjhi's security was upgraded but the LJP chief's father, Ram Vilas Paswan's security was not increased.
The LJP feels that same security cover, which has been extended to Ram Vilas Paswan has also been given to Former Union minister Shahnawaz Hussain, JDU leader Vashist Narayan Singh and Lalan Singh.
Another reason is that Chirag Paswan started 'Bihar First, Bihari First' campaign around a year with a very high pitch but the JDU kept on ignoring this and even they are not ready to add this in the NDA campaign.
The JDU campaign has seven 'Nischay', which is now not accepted by the LJP and the leaders are always attacking it saying it is not implemented properly and lot of corruption took place in this programme, so people are also unhappy with it, hence it will damage NDA's prospect in upcoming elections.
Sanjay Shraff, Spokesperson, LJP said, "Our main agenda is 'Bihar first, Bihari first' and they (JDU) are opposing it. It is our main concern we will fight election on this whether in alliance or as separate." (ANI)