20,000 in my account before contesting the elections. That’s less than half the money that his closest rival, Anjum Ara of the Janata Dal (U), has invested in one LIC policy, according to her poll affidavit.īut the young ‘David’ who emerged from the rough and tumble of student agitations, took the money-muscle powered ‘Goliaths’ head-on and managed to win Dumraon. 20,000 in his bank account when he contested elections from the Dumraon assembly seat. Many of the CPI-ML’s candidates have made it to mainstream politics through the tough grind of student politics.ģ6-year-old Ajit Kushwaha claimed he had just Rs. On the surface of it, the party’s candidates appeared to be a rag-tag bunch, much like Aamir Khan’s subaltern cricket team taking on British soldiers in ‘Lagaan’, the 2001 blockbuster film. Apart from its young lawmakers, party veteran 64-year-old Mahboob Alam, also managed to win by a record margin to earn a fourth stint in the state assembly. In the Bihar polls, even those CPI-ML candidates who did not win, cornered a sizable number of votes, some losing by tiny margins. The party registered the best ‘strike rate’ among all components of the RJD-led mahagathbandhan, which also comprised two other Left parties. On the saffron-dominated national canvas, apart from pockets dominated by regional parties and the Congress, the only traceable red footprint lies in the southern state of Kerala.Īmid this narrative of the Left’s near evaporation from the national polity, it is critical to examine the CPI-ML hot streak – the party fielded 19 candidates out of which 12 won – in the Bihar polls, just two years back. The Left edifice has also crumbled in its traditional bastions of West Bengal and Tripura. In the rest of the country, recent assembly election results have once again shown how Left politics in Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Manipur, Punjab and Goa, have failed to cut ice with voters.
The cake and the cherry in the 2020 polls were cornered by the Bharatiya Janata Party-Janata Dal (U) combine, but the elections also marked the resurgence of Left ideology in the caste politics-ridden state. Manzil, now 39, was one of the 12 Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) candidates who made it to the state assembly that year. When Manoj Manzil defeated his nearest Janata Dal (U) rival to win the Agiaon seat by 48,550 votes in the 2020 Bihar assembly polls, all he owned was a goat, a mud hut on a small piece of land - around three dismil (0.01 hectare) - and zero money in his account.
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