RJD chief ministerial candidate Tejashwi Yadav and his elder brother Tej Pratap are leading in their respective Raghopur and Hasanpur constituency even as latest trends showed the ruling NDA marching ahead of the RJD-led Grand Alliance in the Bihar elections. Eleven of the 13 BJP-JD(U) ministers in the poll fray are leading in their respective assembly constituencies, according to the latest trends of the Election Commission.
In RJD bastion Raghopur, represented by Lalu Prasad in 1995 and 2000, and Rabri Devi in 2005, Tejashwi Yadav is leading by over 8,000 votes to BJP’s Satish Kumar. In the 2015 elections, Tejashwi had won the seat by defeating BJP’s Kumar by a margin of 22,733 votes. The Raghopur Assembly seat is estimated to have around 1.25 lakh Yadavs, with other castes way behind — there are 40,000-odd Rajputs, and around 20,000 SCs and 10,000 non-Yadav OBCs.
His elder brother Tej Pratap is also leading by over 5,000 votes against JD(U)’s Raj Kumar Ray from Samastipur’s Hasanpur constituency — a seat won by the JD(U) as a Grand Alliance constituent in the last Assembly polls. Tej Pratap, who was elected from the Mahua constituency in the last elections, decided to shift to the “safer” Hasanpur seat which has a good combination of Muslim and Yadav votes.
