The ruling NDA’s landslide win in the Bihar Assembly elections includes those seats which the Tejashwi Yadav-led RJD had won comfortably last time.
In 2020, of its 75 seats, the RJD won 45 with at least 40% of the vote share, and 47 with a margin of at least 10,000 votes. It recontested 73 of these 75 seats this time, and lost 55 of them, with more than 25 wrested by the JD(U).
The RJD’s losses include 31 seats where it had won by a margin of at least 10,000 votes in 2020, and 4 where its vote share was greater than 50%. It lost 24 seats despite getting more than 40% of the vote share, and 15 seats despite recording an increase in its vote share from 2020.
As many as 29 sitting RJD MLAs lost.
In 8 seats, the RJD’s vote share dropped by at least 10 percentage points from 2020. The highest decline, of 21.71 percentage points, came in Nawada district’s Gobindpur.
Among the 55 seats it lost this time, the party had replaced its winning candidate from 2020 in 26. Among them was Mokama, where it replaced strongman-turned-politician Anant Singh. Contesting on a JD(U) ticket this time, Singh managed to defeat the RJD’s replacement despite being in jail in connection with the death of a Jan Suraaj supporter during the campaign.
