The BJP on Monday secured the Big Brother role in the Bihar NDA, announcing that the party would contest 17 of the state’s 40 Lok Sabha seats and leaving 16 for chief minister Nitish Kumar’s JDU.

Chirag Paawan’s LJP faction has been assigned five seats. The Hindustani Awam Morcha of former chief minister Jitan Ram Manjhi and former union minister Upendra Kushwaha’s Rashtriya Lok Morcha were given one seat each.

This is the first time the BJP will be contesting a greater number of Lok Sabha seats, even if just one more, in the over two decades of its association with the JDU. Nitish’s JDU had always been the bigger partner in Bihar, but the saffron party has been slowly moving up. In the last Lok Sabha polls, the BJP and the JDU had contested 17 seats each, leaving the rest for the other allies. In 2014, Nitish had broken off with the BJP and gone alone.

BJP general secretary and Bihar minder Vinod Tawde announced the seat-sharing deal at the party headquarters, flanked by alliance leaders.

“We have finalised the seat sharing amicably and are confident that the NDA will sweep all 40 seats in Bihar,” JDU leader and newly elected Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Jha said, not making any reference to possible misgivings over being pushed down by the BJP.

The JDU had won 16 of the 17 seats in the last Lok Sabha polls while the BJP had bagged all 17 it contested.

The BJP this time gave away just one of its seats — Sheohar — to the JDU but in its place took two of the JDU’s seats — Gaya and Karakat. The BJP also snatched the Nawada seat, where the LJP had won last time, endorsing its dominance in Bihar.

In the seat-sharing deal, the BJP has given preference to the LJP faction led by late Ram Vilas Paswan’s son Chirag while leaving out his uncle Pasupati Paras, a cabinet minister in the Modi government. Pasupati and four other LJP MPs had split the party and the BJP had accommodated him in the government but has now dumped him, realising that the sympathy of the Paswan caste voters was with the Chirag faction.

Despite the BJP’s dominance, the share of 16 seats was seen as a “big achievement” for Nitish’s JDU, given his dwindled political heft due to multiple flip-flops. A desperate Nitish had broken off with the RJD-Congress for the second time and realigned with the BJP early this year. Many in the BJP, however, feared that their leadership had made a mistake by handing out 16 seats to the JDU.

“There is a lot of anger against Nitishji. The JDU could lose a good number of seats,” a Bihar BJP MP said. The NDA in 2019 had won 39 of the 40 Lok Sabha seats in the state.

The deal also showed that Modi and the BJP were not ready to take any risk in their endeavour to win most of the 40 seats in Bihar by putting down Nitish. “Our primary aim is to fulfill Modiji’s target of the NDA crossing 400 seats,” a BJP leader said.