His party may not be coming to power in Bihar but RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav is the most popular chief ministerial face in the state, an exit poll has revealed.
Peoples Pulse has predicted that the NDA will win 133-159 seats, the Mahagathbandhan 75-101 and Prashant Kishor's Jan Suraaj Party 0-5, indicating that the ruling alliance will comfortably win a majority. When the pollster surveyed people to see who they would prefer to have as the chief minister, however, most of them took the name of Tejashwi Yadav.
While the RJD leader got 32% of the votes, JDU chief and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar was a close second at 30%, indicating that reports of his failing health and mental acuity have not dented his popularity too much. Tied for third were Union Minister Chirag Paswan of the LJP (Ram Vilas) and the fledgling Jan Suraaj Party's Prashant Kishor at 8%.
While Paswan has been active in politics for some time now, Kishor made the jump from being a poll strategist recently, and the relatively high figure should give him and his party hope, especially since most exit polls have predicted that it will end up with between zero and five seats.
The next highest number of votes was for BJP leader and Deputy Chief Minister Samrat Choudhary at 6% while Rajesh Kumar, the president of the Congress in Bihar, managed to get only 2%. Others accounted for the remaining 14%.
Health warning: Exit polls often get it wrong.
The poll indicates that even though the RJD-Congress-led Mahagathbandhan is unlikely to come to power in Bihar, Tejashwi Yadav's personal popularity is very high, and voters see him as a viable candidate to head the government in the state. This bodes well for him, especially since he is only 36 and presumably has a long political innings ahead.
What will come as a boost for Nitish Kumar, however, is that most exit polls have predicted that the NDA will return with a bigger majority and, should the JDU chief get the chief minister's chair again, he will be heading a stronger government and can implement a development-focused agenda. The amount of freedom he gets in such a role will be determined by the number of seats his party eventually wins on counting day, which is Friday.
