Bihar Assembly election results 2025: How is Mukesh Sahani-led VIP faring? All you need to know

Hours into the counting of votes to determine a winning coalition in the Bihar Assembly elections, Mukesh Sahani-led Vikassheel Insaan Party (VIP) appears to have fared poorly, as it managed to lead in just one seat, as per the Election Commission. This is a major blow for the Mahagathbandhan, which had fielded Sahani's party in 15 seats. The grand alliance's chief ministerial face and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader Tejashwi Yadav had even promised him the position of Deputy CM in his cabinet if the grand alliance won in the elections. Yadav had also dismissed earlier exit polls, which had predicted that the VIP, in addition to the Prashant Kishor-led Jan Suraaj Party (JSP), would not even open their accounts in Bihar. The VIP's support base primarily comprises the Nishad, Noniya, Bind, and Beldar communities, which include 20 sub-castes of fishermen and boatmen. An analyst claims that Yadav's promise to nominate Sahani as Bihar's Deputy CM also caused resentment amongst Muslims—one half of the Muslim-Yadav (M-Y) constituencies that the RJD relies on, as per a Live Hindustan report. As a result, in some seats, Muslims shifted their votes from the RJD to either NDA constituents, or to parties like AIMIM and the JSP, hurting RJD's vote base. The VIP's dismal performance so far has also brought up an interesting contest within the grand alliance for the Gaura Bauram seat. Originally allocated to the VIP and contested by Mukesh's brother Santosh Sahani, the nomination was withdrawn at the last moment because an RJD leader had filed his nomination there too, a Jagran report said. Though Mukesh Sahani had campaigned for BJP in the 2015 Bihar Legislative Assembly elections, the VIP has been associated with the grand alliance since the party's formation in 2018. However, following his poor performance in contesting the Madhubani, Muzaffarpur, and Khagaria seats in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, he defected to the NDA side in October 2020. However, he fared poorly at the 2020 Assembly elections, despite his party winning four of the 11 seats it contested. Still, he was admitted into the Nitish Kumar cabinet as the Minister for Animal Husbandry and Fisheries till March 2022, but he switched back to his current place in the grand alliance in 2024, after a few of his party's MLAs defected to the BJP, declaring that he was 'backstabbed'.