A strong presence of the Left had earned Begusarai the epithet “Leningrad of Bihar” but the Red brigade here is now grappling with the saffron surge.
The BJP fielded Union Minister Giriraj Singh again from Begusarai, while CPI nominated Awadhesh Rai, as the united opposition candidate in the seat where the situation has changed much compared to that in 2019.
But the key change, the mindset of the voters, was noticed even earlier.
The ideological drift was, perhaps, best witnessed in the watershed elections of 2014, when the seat was won by late Bhola Singh on a BJP ticket, decades after he had begun his political career as an MLA of the CPI.
Five years later, with Bhola Singh no more, the BJP brought in here Giriraj Singh, an “outsider” who inflicted a crushing defeat on “local” Kanhaiya Kumar.
The electoral battle this time is not as eyeball-grabbing as it was in 2019, thanks to the electrifying presence of Kanhaiya Kumar, who had launched a spirited campaign, to which many celebrities like Javed Akhtar, Shabana Azmi, Swara Bhaskar and Prakash Raj had lent their heft.
The CPI debutant, who has since moved to the Congress which has fielded him from Delhi North East, was badly hit by the RJD's decision to field its own candidate who cut into the anti-BJP votes, offering Giriraj Singh a victory on the platter, with a margin of over four lakh votes.
Five years down the line, though, many variables seem to have changed. The “outsider” tag against Singh, who hails from Barahiya in Lakhisarai district, right across the Ganges, may no longer stand. But the absence of an over-arching narrative of nationalism fuelled by the Pulwama terror attack leaves the Union minister devoid of the ballast that he would have liked for his dog-whistling rhetoric.
Moreover, unlike in 2019, the RJD, arguably the strongest regional party in Bihar, is not trying to play spoilsport this time. Its chemistry with the Left has also been tried and tested in the 2020 assembly polls when CPI(ML), CPI and CPI(M) together came out with a better-than-expected performance.
In the assembly polls, the CPI bagged two seats, both in Begusarai, where the RJD also notched up as many, while the BJP-JD(U) combine could win only three.
Unlike predecessor Bhola Singh who was a party-hopper, having tried his luck in a number of parties before joining the BJP, Giriraj Singh is a dyed-in-the-wool RSS man, who had earned his spurs as an ABVP activist.
Tall and powerfully built, the Union minister has proudly prefixed “Shandilya”, his “gotra”, to his profile on X, and moves around sporting a fiery red “tilak” on his broad forehead and a tuft of hair dangling from the crown, warning all those who come his way that here is a man who wears his Hindutva on his sleeve.
