Bihar Assembly Elections 2020: Congress set to finalise list of candidates today

New Delhi, Oct 05: The Congress is expected to finalise its list of candidates for the Bihar Assembly Elections 2020 today.

Following a seat sharing deal with the RJD on Saturday, the Congress will field candidates in 70 constituencies. In the 2010 Bihar Elections, the Congress had contested all 243 seats. However the party managed to win just four seat that year.

In 2015 the Congress joined the grand alliance and contested 41 seats of which it managed to win 27.

RJD's Tejashwi Yadav will be the chief ministerial candidate of the oOpposition Grand Alliance in Bihar as it announced a seat-sharing formula on Saturday for the upcoming Assembly polls under which his party will contest 144 of a total 243 seats.

But the multi-party alliance suffered a jolt when a minor constituent Vikashheel Insaan Party (VIP) floated by Mukesh Sahani, a former Bollywood set designer, announced a dramatic exit alleging betrayal.

Yadav, son of Rashtriya Janata Dal(RJD) supremo Lalu Prasad Yadav, announced the number of seats allocated to the Congress, the CPI(ML), the CPI(M) and the CPI, and said his party will contest from 144 assembly constituencies.

Congress was given 70 seats, far more than it had contested in the 2015 assembly polls in alliance with the RJD and Chief Minister Nitish Kumar's JD(U).

The Congress will also be fielding its candidate in Valmiki Nagar Lok Sabha seat where by-poll will be held on November 7.

Among the Left parties, the CPI(ML) was given 19 seats, followed by CPI (six) and four seats to CPI(M).

The RJD agreed to accommodate VIP, its alliance partner since the Lok Sabha polls last year, and JMM, its ally in adjoining Jharkhand, from its own quota of seats. Yadav said the RJD will declare in another two to three days the seats it will be giving to the two parties from its quota.

Bihar has a 243-member Assembly. The RJD had won 81 seats in 2015 while the Congress bagged 27.

Mukesh, who considers himself as 'Son of Mallah', fumed at the seat sharing formula after other alliance leaders had left the news conference venue. Earlier, there was speculation that VIP party, which claims support among the fishermen community, will be getting around half-a-dozen seats.