Patna

Altogether nine candidates of the ruling NDA in Bihar, including Bhojpuri superstar Pawan Singh and state minister Nishant Kumar, on Monday filed their nomination for the legislative council polls.

Biennial polls are being held for nine seats of the 75-member House, and eight of these are being contested by the ruling coalition. The last date for withdrawal of nomination papers is June 11 and voting is scheduled for June 18.

A huge crowd had turned up at the Vidhan Sabha premises to catch a glimpse of Pawan Singh, whom the BJP has backed for a legislative council berth.

Singh had, in 2024, turned down a BJP ticket from Asansol in West Bengal and contested the Karakat Lok Sabha seat in Bihar as an Independent, a move that is said to have adversely affected the NDA in the Shahabad region, where the ruling coalition ended up conceding a number of seats to the INDIA bloc.

He returned to the BJP ahead of the assembly polls held in November last year, asserting that he wanted to "remain a true soldier of the party" and had not come back hoping for a ticket in the elections.

Nishant, the son of former chief minister Nitish Kumar, was accompanied by Sanjay Jha, the national working president of the JD(U) which his father heads, and Rajiv Ranjan Singh alias Lalan, a Union minister from the party's quota.

The JD(U) president was conspicuous by his absence and according to party leaders who had turned up to cheer the heir apparent, the veteran leader was away in Rohtas district to meet an old friend.

Chief Minister Samrat Choudhary, who in April became the first BJP leader to head a government in Bihar, and Union minister Chirag Paswan, who heads the Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas), were among those who turned up at the Vidhan Sabha secretariat.

Besides Singh and BJP national media co in-charge Sanjay Mayukh, who will run for a third consecutive term, other party candidates were Anil Thakur and Sheela Pandit, both grassroots-level workers who have held various posts in the state unit.

While Singh and Mayukh belong to the upper castes, the BJP's traditional support base, Thakur and Pandit come from the numerically powerful extremely backward classes, to whom the party has been reaching out.

The JD(U) candidates, besides Nishant, include Bharti Mehta, an EBC leader who has also been the party's spokesperson, and Shivrani Devi Prajapati, an OBC who is a former state general secretary.

Another JD(U) candidate, Lalan Prasad, filed his nomination papers for by-election to a legislative council seat that fell vacant upon resignation of the party chief, who is now a Rajya Sabha MP.

Besides, LJPRV candidate Ashraf Ansari, a trusted aide of the founding president, also filed his nomination papers.

The party's parliamentary board chairman Arun Bharti, who is also Chirag Paswan's brother-in-law, told reporters on the occasion that "our leader has lived by the principles of his father who had called for a Muslim to be the chief minister of Bihar".

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The allusion was to late Ram Vilas Paswan, who famously gave up his Union cabinet berth in protest against the Gujarat riots of 2005, and, three years later, when assembly polls in Bihar threw up a hung house in which his Lok Janshakti Party won nearly two dozen seats, pledged support to any formation that agreed to form a government headed by a person from the minority community.

One of the nine seats going to polls is being contested by the RJD, the main party in opposition, which has backed Sunil Kumar Singh for a third consecutive term.