Rashtriya Lok Janshakti Party President Pashupati Kumar Paras on Tuesday resigned as a Union minister and said that “injustice” had been done to his party, PTI reported.
The development comes a day after the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance announced its seat-sharing arrangement in Bihar for the Lok Sabha elections. The Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas) led by Chirag Paswan will fight from five seats in the state.
Both the Rashtriya Lok Janshakti Party and the Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas) are part of the National Democratic Alliance.
The BJP and Paswan’s Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas) had agreed to this arrangement last week. As per the arrangement, Paswan was not expected to share any seats with Paras, who is his estranged uncle.
On Tuesday, Paras said that he had worked for the BJP-led coalition with “full honesty”.
“I am thankful to Prime Minister Narendra Modi,” he said. “However, injustice has been done to me and our party. Hence, I am resigning as Union minister.”
The Lok Janshakti Party plunged into a crisis in June 2021 when five of its six Lok Sabha MPs rebelled against Paswan and told Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla that they had chosen Paras as the party’s leader in Parliament. Birla had accepted Paras as the party’s floor leader in the Lok Sabha.
After this, the party split into two: the Paswan-led Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas) and the Paras-led Rashtriya Lok Janshakti Party.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP had won 17 seats. While Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United) had won 14 seats, the united Lok Janshakti Party had won six.
While the Opposition Rashtriya Janata Dal failed to win a single Lok Sabha seat in the state, the Congress managed to win one seat.
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