Begusarai has long been known as the ‘Leningrad of Bihar’ or as ‘Mini Moscow’ because of the political dominance of the Communist Party of India (CPI), which emerged in the region to counter the feudalism allegedly practiced by the Congress party for decades .
About one hundred political workers belonging to the Communist and Congress parties have been murdered in the villages of Begusarai over the years. The BJP entered Begusarai’s political space in 2014 when its candidate Bhola Singh won the Lok Sabha election, and the party’s presence peaked in 2019 when its nominee Giriraj Singh won the constituency, defeating CPI candidate Kanhaiya Kumar, a former president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Student’s Union, by over four lakh votes.
The Begusarai constituency has also been a stronghold of the upper caste Bhumihar community; since Independence, every candidate who has won the seat hailed from this community, except in 2009, when Janata Dal (United) candidate Monazir Hassan won the poll. This time round, BJP candidate and sitting MP Giriraj Singh, a Bhumihar, is pitted against Awadhesh Kumar Rai, a former three-time CPI MLA from the Bachhwara Assembly constituency, who comes from the backward Yadav caste.
Out of total 21 lakh voters in Begusarai, there are over three lakh Bhumihars, while Yadavs and Muslims account for over 2.5 lakh voters each. “But one does not know that backward and extremely backward class voters outnumber all these caste groups in the constituency,” said Abhishek Kumar, a young voter who also runs a news portal.
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