Bihar Assembly Election 2020: Will VIP’s Mukesh Sahni make fight for Simri Bakhtiarpur tough for LJP, RJD?

Simri Bakhtiarpur Assembly constituency, located in Saharsa, comes under the Khagaria Lok Sabha constituency. This is one of the 78 seats going to polls on November 7 — in the third and last phase of Bihar assembly election 2020. What makes this constituency interesting this time is the presence of Mukesh Sahni, the founder of Vikassheel Insaan Party. Apart from Sahni, who is a known stage designer of Bollywood of Devdas-fame (his company created stage for the film), LJP’s Sanjay Kumar Singh, RJD’s Yusuf Salahuddin are in the fray. VIP is part of the JD(U)-NDA alliance. Salahuddin is the son of LJP MP Choudhary Mehboob Ali Qaiser.

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Choudhary Mehboob Ali Qaiser (LJP) is the present Lok Sabha MP of Khagaria and Zafar Alam (RJD) is the present MLA of Simri Bakhtiarpur Legislative Assembly who won the seat in by-polls held in 2019, following the resignation of JD-U MLA Dinesh Chandra Yadav after he got elected from Madhepura Lok Sabha seat.

In 2019, RJD’s Zafar Alam had defeated Dr Arun Kumar of JD-U by 15,508 votes in the by-poll in 2019. VIP’s Dinesh Nishad was pushed to third position and scored 25,225 votes.

As per the estimates of 2011 census, out of total 5,01,605 population, 100% is rural and 0% is urban population. The Scheduled castes (SC) and Scheduled tribes (ST) ratio is 18.42 and 0.04, respectively.

As per the voter list of 2019, there are 3,22,704 electorates and 338 polling stations in this constituency. Voter turnout was 57.08% in 2019 Lok Sabha elections where as it was 54.31% in the 2015 assembly elections.

Out of its 3,38,268 electorates (as in 2020), 1, 75, 562 are male and 1, 62, 699 are female voters. Seven voters belong to the third gender.

In 2015, Dinesh Chandra Yadav of JD-U had defeated LJP’s Yusuf Salam by 37,806 votes.