Bihar: Upendra Kushwaha’s RLSP Quits RJD-Led Grand Alliance, to Form 3rd Front With BSP

The Tejashwi Yadav led RJD had been reportedly freezing out RLSP, which leaders of the former felt did not bring the unquestioned support of any community to the table.

New Delhi: True to anticipation, the Rashtriya Lok Samata Party (RLSP) leader Upendra Kushwaha broke off his party’s alliance with the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD)-led opposition front, or the mahagathbandhan, on Tuesday. 

He announced his plan to forge a third alliance with the Bahujan Samaj Party and other smaller parties. “My party has made an alliance with the Bahujan Samaj Party, the Janwadi Party (Socialist) and other parties to contest all the 243 Assembly seats and to form a government,” Kushwaha told the media in Patna.

While doing so, he hit out at once at the current Nitish Kumar-led Janata Dal (United)-Bharatiya Janata Party state government and the earlier RJD governments for failing on the developmental front.


Kushwaha, who emerged as a leader in his own right after he led a movement to strengthen public education in Bihar, said that both the parties have a poor record on issues of corruption, education, law and order, and medical facilities in the state.

“I think the BJP controls both the NDA and RJD either directly or indirectly in the state. The NDA government is mired in corruption…in government offices no work is done without giving a bribe…educational and medical facilities in Bihar too are worse than other states,” he said. 

“They were bad as well,” the RLSP leader said on the previous RJD governments, adding, “The 15 years of the RJD government and the 15 years of the current NDA government are two sides of the same coin.”

He declared that his alliance would focus on education in the state. “Abki baar, sikhshawali sarkar (this time, a government of education),” he said, adding that he was not attempting to join the NDA again as is being speculated by certain media reports.  

A part of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance until December 2018, Kushwaha quit as the junior HRD minister of the Narendra Modi cabinet over differences with his arch rival and Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar.

His problems in the NDA started when Nitish Kumar dumped the RJD to form the state government with the BJP. With Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United) as an equal partner of the BJP in the alliance, Kushwaha felt short changed, more so when he was offered only two seats to contest from in the 2019 parliamentary polls. His party had contested in three constituencies in the 2014 general elections. 

Also read: In Bihar, Kushwaha’s Dissent Against NDA May Tip the Scale in Favour of Opposition

Subsequently, he joined the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance, and settled for two seats in Bihar. Kushwaha ended up contesting and losing from both the seats. In the run-up to the state assembly polls, his relationship with RJD became less than cordial. RJD’s top leader Tejashwi Yadav felt that the RLSP did not bring anything new to the table, neither in mass appeal nor in terms of the larger caste dynamics in the state demanded. 

RJD commands support from a large section of the OBC Yadav community and Muslims. Its biggest partner in the grand alliance, the Congress has a section of Brahmins and Dalits as its support base. The Left parties, especially the Communist Party of India (ML-Liberation), have their own pockets of influence in central Bihar. The fourth constituent, although a much smaller one, is Mukesh Sahni’s Vikassheel Insaan Party (VIP) has some influence among the Nishad community of fishing folk in some pockets of Bihar.

“With such equations at play,” an RJD leader told The Wire, “we have felt that Kushwaha wouldn’t give us any edge as his community has largely been voting for Nitish Kumar.” 

Also read: Will Kushwaha’s ‘Kheer’ Recipe Change Caste Arithmetic in Bihar’s Politics?

In seat-sharing talks, RJD is said to have made it clear to its party leaders that RLSP should not be given more seats than it deserved. Tejashwi Yadav was also unsure about Kushwaha’s commitment to the mahagathbandhan.

“He is not confident that the party will stay on with the Opposition alliance in a post-poll scenario, especially if the victory margin between the NDA and the mahagatbandhan is narrow. He also feels that RLSP brings very little to the table,” a senior Congress leader told The Hindu. 

Walking out of the opposition alliance was perhaps the only option left for Kushwaha. However, this did not go as well as he could have expected. On Monday, his party received a jolt when the state RLSP chief Bhudeo Chaudhary joined the RJD. 

RLSP’s exit from the grand alliance has come weeks after another constituent, former chief minister Jitan Ram Manjhi-led Hindustani Awam Morcha, left the alliance to join the NDA. Manjhi, too, had had disagreements with Tejashwi, and was reportedly unhappy over the number of seats his party was offered to contest from.