By Arun Upadhayay 
Patna, June 8: Monday morning at the Bihar Vidhan Sabha in Patna felt a little different from most days. The kind of crowd that gathered outside the assembly premises was not the usual mix of party workers and journalists. There were regular people too young men with phones out, older folks craning their necks, the general curiosity that follows one particular kind of celebrity wherever he goes in this part of India.
Pawan Singh had come to file his nomination papers.
Not for a film. Not for a concert tour. For a seat in the Bihar Legislative Council the upper house of the state legislature as an official BJP candidate for the Bihar Vidhan Parishad biennial elections 2026.
And the BJP, to its credit, did not treat this like a quiet administrative formality. Chief Minister Samrat Chaudhary showed up. Union Minister Chirag Paswan was there. Lalan Singh, another Union Minister from Bihar, came too. So did Deputy Chief Minister Bijendra Prasad Yadav. Four of the most powerful names in Bihar politics, all in the same place at the same time, to mark the occasion of one man signing his nomination papers.
If you needed any proof of how much the party values what Pawan Singh brings to the table, that image was it.
From Suspension to Standing Ovation
Here is something worth knowing before we go further. The same Pawan Singh who walked into that assembly building surrounded by BJP leaders on Monday was, not too long ago, thrown out of the very same party.
It happened in 2024, around the time of the Lok Sabha elections. The BJP offered him a ticket from Asansol in West Bengal. He was not interested. He wanted to contest from his own turf in Bihar specifically Karakat constituency in Rohtas district, which is essentially his home ground. The party had already promised that seat to Upendra Kushwaha of the Rashtriya Lok Morcha, an NDA ally. There was no room for Pawan Singh there.
He filed anyway. As an independent.
The BJP did not blink. Samrat Chaudhary, then the state party president, issued a suspension order almost immediately. Anti-party activity, the official statement read. The message was clear nobody jumps the queue in a coalition and gets to stay in good standing.
Pawan Singh fought that election, lost, finished second, and went back to his life. His music kept playing. His films kept releasing. His fans did not go anywhere.
And then, quietly, somewhere between 2024 and today, the party decided it needed him back. He was reinstated, given a ticket for the MLC elections, and on Monday morning the same leader whose suspension was signed by Samrat Chaudhary stood right next to him as Bihar’s sitting Chief Minister. That is Bihar politics for you. Grudges have a shelf life. Usefulness does not expire.
What Actually Happened on Monday
June 8 was the last date for candidates to submit their nomination papers ahead of the June 18 polling date. The NDA made it count.
All nine of the alliance’s candidates filed on the same day, and the senior leadership turned up in numbers to make the occasion feel like more than just paperwork. There was a coordinated quality to the whole thing the who’s-who gathered in one place, the presence of Union Ministers, the supporters outside making noise.
From the BJP’s side, the four candidates were Pawan Singh, Dr Sanjay Mayukh a man who has been doing this for a while and is in fact running for his third straight MLC term along with Anil Kumar Thakur and Sheela Pandit, both longtime party workers who have put in years at the ground level without the fanfare.
JD(U) put up four candidates of their own. The most talked-about among them was Nishant Kumar, Bihar’s Health Minister, and yes, also the son of former Chief Minister Nitish Kumar. Nishant filed his papers with Sanjay Jha, the JD(U) national working president, and Union Minister Lalan Singh by his side. His father was notably absent. Party sources said Nitish Kumar was in Rohtas visiting an old friend. Whether that absence was coincidental or deliberate is something only the people inside that decision know for certain.
Chirag Paswan’s Lok Janshakti Party fielded Ashraf Ansari, who is a trusted face within the LJPRV. The party’s parliamentary board chairman Arun Bharti Chirag Paswan’s brother-in-law spoke to reporters outside the assembly and mentioned that the party has always believed in inclusive representation, invoking the memory of the late Ram Vilas Paswan.
On the other side of the room, the Mahagathbandhan had a noticeably quieter showing. RJD’s Sunil Kumar Singh was the only prominent opposition candidate who came in the morning. Ten candidates in all from the opposition camp, but without the visible political muscle that the NDA brought along. It is a small thing, but these moments of optics matter in Indian politics more than people sometimes acknowledge.
Who Exactly Is Pawan Singh
If you have grown up in Bihar, Jharkhand, or the eastern districts of Uttar Pradesh, this question probably seems unnecessary. But for readers elsewhere, a quick sketch.
Pawan Singh is one of the most recognised faces in Bhojpuri entertainment a film and music industry that does not get nearly the mainstream coverage it deserves given how enormous its audience actually is. He has been acting and singing for over two decades. His songs have been played at weddings across dozens of districts. His films draw crowds in towns and cities that bigger Hindi releases sometimes do not bother to release in. He has a kind of mass connect in the Bhojpuri belt that most politicians would trade almost anything for.
His fanbase is not concentrated in cities. It is deep inside smaller towns, in villages, among daily wage workers, farmers, young men on motorcycles, families watching television on Sunday evenings. These are the voters that every party in Bihar wants to reach, and Pawan Singh reaches them without trying.
That is the asset the BJP is backing here.
Now, to be clear about how these MLC elections actually work the general public does not vote directly. Members of the Vidhan Sabha, local body representatives and other institutional voters form the electoral college. The NDA already has the numbers it needs in the assembly to ensure its candidates sail through. Pawan Singh is almost certainly going to win this seat on the back of that arithmetic alone, not because of his celebrity.
But elections are about more than just winning a particular seat on a particular day. Giving him this ticket is a statement about which communities the BJP wants to court in Bihar over the next few years, and what kind of politics they want to be seen standing for in the Bhojpuri heartland.
The One Awkward Moment
Not everything on Monday went without a wrinkle. Several people in political circles had expected to see Deepak Prakash, a former BJP state president, somewhere in the NDA list. His name was not there. Reporters noticed and asked questions.
Shravan Kumar of JD(U), a Bihar cabinet minister, was asked about it directly. His response was essentially that the BJP handles its own candidate selection which is accurate and also tells you nothing. The fact that a former state president of the party was left out is the kind of thing that does not get forgotten easily, even if nobody is making loud statements about it right now.
These little tensions are normal in coalition politics. They rarely explode into open conflict immediately. They simmer.
Looking at June 18 and Beyond
The Bihar Vidhan Parishad elections are eight days away. The NDA’s dominance in the legislative assembly makes their candidates heavy favourites. Pawan Singh, in all likelihood, will become a member of the Bihar Legislative Council for the first time in his life.
What comes after is genuinely uncertain. The Legislative Council is not where Bihar’s loudest political battles are fought. It is a more deliberative space, less of a spectacle. Whether Singh settles into that role and uses it to build something real, or whether this is simply the party parking a valuable face in a guaranteed seat to keep him close that remains to be seen.
What Monday made obvious, though, is that the BJP sees Pawan Singh as a long-term investment, not a one-time arrangement. You do not bring out your Chief Minister and two Union Ministers for a one-off gesture. There is a plan here, even if nobody is spelling it out in front of cameras.
Bihar will watch. It usually does.
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- Arun Upadhayay
- Arun Upadhayay
- Arun Upadhayay
- Arun Upadhayay
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