The BJP has in one stroke decimated its senior and secular leadership in Bihar.

It has appointed several of its seasoned leaders as chairpersons of various Assembly committees, effectively removing them from the race for ministerial berths in chief minister Nitish Kumar’s cabinet.

The choices indicate that the BJP is shedding its secular faces and planning to go the whole hog on the hardline path, but has also led to murmurs about factionalism and injustice in the rank and file of the party.

Assembly Speaker Vijay Kumar Sinha announced the chairpersons of the different committees on Monday. Senior BJP leaders Nand Kishore Yadav and Prem Kumar, who have been elected to the House for the seventh and the eighth time, respectively, figured on the list.

Both had been part of the NDA government in Bihar since the beginning. Nand Kishore will now head the estimates committee while Prem will chair the petition committee.

Other veteran leaders Vinod Narayan Jha, Ram Narayan Mandal and Krishna Kumar Rishi will also head different Assembly committees. They too had served as ministers in the previous NDA governments.

Traditionally, the chairpersons of the House committees are not made ministers and vice-versa.

The move by the BJP to herd these veteran leaders into the House committees came at a time when they were being seen as the top contenders for ministerial berths. It also completed the chain that began with the sidelining of former deputy chief minister Sushil Kumar Modi and shifting him out of the state’s political scene by sending him to the Rajya Sabha.

“Be it Sushil, Nand Kishore, Prem, Vinod or others, they all have given their life to the party and the organisation. They were the ones who took the party to every nook and corner of the state. Now they all have been sidelined. None of them are too old to work. This shows that there is not much value for work, seniority, experience and loyalty here,” a BJP leader said on the condition of anonymity.

Incidentally, all the sidelined senior leaders have been the secular faces of the BJP in Bihar. They had stayed away from the communal agenda and were never considered hardliners. Sushil’s wife is a Christian tracing her roots to Goa, while Nand Kishore had always revelled in reciting Urdu poetry during his speeches in the Assembly.

While sources in the BJP said that the leaders’ good relations with chief minister and Janata Dal United president Nitish did them in, they also pointed towards factionalism in the Bihar BJP.

“Different factions and lobbies are active in the party in Bihar. They are headed by Nityanand Rai (Union minister of state for home affairs), state unit chief Sanjay Jaiswal, and Union minister Ravishankar Prasad. Some of them are even contenders for the chief minister’s post. Whatever is happening in the party is due to the pulls and pressures of these groups despite the fact that they have the stamp of approval of our top leadership. But this will not be good for us in the long run,” a BJP source told The Telegraph.

Asked about the internal wrangle in the party and sidelining of several senior leaders, BJP spokesperson Prem Ranjan Patel denied any such development and said that the seniormost members of the Assembly had been made chairpersons of the House committees.

“Expansion and change keep happening in the party. New people keep coming in. Our central and state leaderships assign work and roles to our party leaders. When the time comes for cabinet expansion, our leadership will decide who will become ministers,” Prem Ranjan told this newspaper.

With the cabinet expansion due in Bihar and the “khar mas”, or the 30 days time considered inauspicious for new ventures setting in, Nitish has put the ball in the BJP’s court by highlighting that the delay has been due to the ally.

“There has been no talk of cabinet expansion so far. We will take a decision on it after the BJP sends a proposal,” Nitish told reporters on Tuesday.

The BJP with 74 seats is the biggest partner in the NDA government in Bihar while Nitish’s JDU has 43 seats. The Hindustani Awam Morcha Secular and the Vikassheel Insan Party have four seats each.

The BJP held a two-day internal meeting at Vaishaligarh in Vaishali district to deliberate on the party’s course in 2021. It was chaired by its Bihar in-charge Bhupendra Yadav and national general secretary (organisation) B.L. Santhosh and ended on Tuesday.