The Rashtriya Janata Dal on Tuesday released a list of 22 candidates for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections, officially confirming the candidature of party supremo Lalu Prasad’s daughters Rohini Acharya and Misa Bharti from Saran and Pataliputra Lok Sabha seats, respectively.
Acharya kicked off her election campaign last week with a road show despite no official announcement from the RJD. She will be up against sitting BJP MP Rajiv Pratap Rudy.
From the Pataliputra seat, Misa Bharti will be up against her father’s former aide Ram Kirpal Yadav, who quit the RJD and joined the BJP in 2014.
The RJD has fielded gangster-turned-politician Vijay Kumar Shukla alias Munna Shukla from Vaishali. Munna Shukla recently landed in trouble over casteist remarks after meeting RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav to seek the party symbol from Vaishali.
Finding himself in the dock, Munna Shukla apologised saying “I have deep regard for the Ravidas community, which is the leading community in society. If they are feeling hurt due to my words, I take them back. I never intended to insult anyone.”
Munna Shukla had fought two times from the Vaishali parliamentary constituency in 2004 as an independent candidate and in 2009 as a JD(U) candidate but lost.
Shukla was one of the accused in the murder of IAS officer G Krishnaiah in 1994 but was acquitted for want of evidence. At one time, Shukla’s influence ran in the Muzaffarpur-Vaishali belt of north Bihar. He was convicted in the murder case of then-minister Brij Bihari.
Alok Mehta, Sudhakar Singh, and Lalit Yadav — former ministers in the previous Grand Alliance government in Bihar – will contest the parliamentary polls this time from Ujiyarpur, Buxar, and Darbhanga Lok Sabha seats.
Bima Bharti, who recently crossed over from JD-U to the RJD, has been fielded from Purnea, a seat Pappu Yadav is adamant about contesting. Pappu Yadav, who merged his party with Congress, has filed his nomination papers from Purnea as an independent candidate.
The RJD has given a maximum of eight tickets to Yadavs, followed by three tickets to the Kushwaha community (which falls under the OBC), two from extremely backward classes ( EBCs), three from Scheduled Caste, one from Dhanuk (OBC), two from Muslim community and one from Vaishya community.
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