Vikram Kunwar sounded relieved when I bumped into him on the evening of November 1, the day Raghunathpur went to polls. A few weeks ago Kunwar, the current Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA) from Siwan’s Raghunathpur constituency in western Bihar, had made news after he had alleged that his party, BJP, had sold the Raghunathpur ticket for 2015 assembly elections to another, less deserving candidate called Manoj Singh for Rs 2 crore.

Kunwar was one of the 20 odd BJP MLAs who, in line with the new strategies designed by Team Amit Shah, were denied a ticket to contest the 2015 elections. But the protest didn’t get Kunwar a ticket — from BJP or anywhere else; frustrated and without much to do, he started campaigning in support of the rival Janata candidate from Lalu Prasad Yadav’s party Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD).

A local reporter from Siwan and I were coming back from Raghunathpur, when Kunwar, who had also been touring the area, approached us to know what we had seen. “Kya dekhe aap log: laalten jeet raha hai na?” he asked us rhetorically, almost certain. “The lantern [RJD’s symbol] is winning, right?”

Vikram Kunwar, the BJP MLA from Siwan’s Raghunathpur constituency.

Kunwar’s neurosis was personal. He knows that if by any chance BJP candidate Manoj Singh becomes the new MLA, he might extract a revenge from Kunwar for maligning him. And revenge can mean anything — from curtailing business interests to (though increasingly infrequently) a murder.

In the early decades of India’s Independence, Siwan’s claim to fame was being the birthplace of Rajendra Prasad, India’s first president. By the early 1990s, though, the district became synonymous with Mohammad Shahabuddin — a criminal-politician, who has ruled Siwan, directly and indirectly, for the last 25 years. “Siwan mein aaj bhi Shahabuddin ke alawa kuch nahi hai,” a government official in Siwan, requesting anonymity, said. “He has been an administrator’s nightmare.”

Jiradei, Rajendra’s Prasad village, is now one of the eight assembly constituencies of Siwan; that apart, not much has changed here.

At least some of Shahabuddin’s rise had to do with Siwan’s demography: Muslims constitute about 20 per cent of the district’s population, closely seconded by Yadavs. Since 1990 Lalu — with his all-too-public hatred of upper castes — had successfully managed to craft a unique Muslim-Yadav coalition in Bihar. Lalu had earlier seen potential in Shahabuddin who, as a student union leader in the late 1980s, was known for his violent ways of dealing with both the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) and BJP. Shahabuddin became an MLA in 1990 from Lalu’s Janata Dal; he was barely 23.

As Lalu let the governance in Bihar wither, Shahabuddin made Siwan more dependent on himself. By the mid ‘90s, he started running a parallel government in the district; he ran his courts, giving swift verdict on all things: land disputes, private doctors’ fees, even marital problems. At the same time, he and his men ruthlessly killed anyone who sought to disturb the equilibrium. Politicians and activists associated with the peoples’ movements, often from the Left, became the easiest targets – though there was nothing ideological about it. The most high-profile among such murders was that of Chandrashekhar, the former president of Jawaharlal Nehru University student union, in 1997.

All of this changed when Nitish Kumar became the chief minister in 2005. In 2007, Shahabuddin was convicted of abduction of a local communist leader Chhote Lal Gupta, and awarded a life term in prison. Since then he has been in the jail. (He was later also convicted in multiple other criminal cases of all kinds.) With time his influence has waned.

BJP’s rise in Siwan coincided with Shahabuddin’s decline. In the 2010 assembly elections, the then National Democratic Alliance led by Nitish swept all of the eight constituencies: BJP won five; Janata Dal (United) won three. After Nitish broke the coalition in 2013, BJP in Siwan – as indeed everywhere else in Bihar – became stronger: Om Prakash Yadav of BJP won the last year’s Lok Sabha elections by defeating Shahabuddin’s wife Heena Shahab by more than one lakh votes.

A polling booth in the Muslim-majority block of Hussainganj in Raghunathpur constituency.

BJP’s new-found confidence was visible on October 30, the last day of campaigning. One of the first things I saw after reaching Siwan on this day was BJP’s supporters aggressively conducting motorbike parades across the town, furiously chanting Bharat Mata ki Jai and Vande Mataram, their heads covered with makeshift saffron turbans.

“BJP tried its best to polarise the voters in Siwan,” a government official told me. “They could have easily taken out the Dusshera procession on October 23. We tried convincing, but they were adamant. They made it a point to coincide it with Muharram on October 24.^. We had a tough time making the security arrangements.”

And yet there is no guarantee BJP would do well in the present assembly elections. This is because of a tri-cornered contest between Janata, NDA and the Left parties in most of Siwan’s constituencies.

Consider Raghunathpur. A curious thing about this seat is that both RJD and BJP candidates have a history of association with Shahabuddin. But while RJD candidate Hari Shankar Yadav still takes orders from the “Saheb”, BJP candidate Manoj Singh – popular in Siwan as Shahabuddin’s former shooter – now talks about love jihad and crime by Muslims.

The answer to who is going to win the Raghunathpur seat depends on who you ask. If the respondents are upper castes, such as the elderly Rajput men I met in a polling booth outside Amvari village, it’s clearly “kamal chhap”, the BJP. The usual clichés: “Nitish agar Lalu se haath na milaate toh fiza kuch aur hoti”; “Aam janata parivartan chahti hai”.

Others are less vocal. The Kurmi man standing outside the booth needed some prodding. “Idhar laalten aur kamal dono hai.” Which one did he vote for? “Laalten,” he said reluctantly. For Muslim men and women, though, lantern was often the unanimous choice.

Amar Nath Yadav of Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) (Liberation) also has a significant support here: In the 2010 assembly elections, he was the runner-up. Amar Nath Yadav even won the 1995 assembly elections from the neighbouring constituency of Darauli. But CPI (ML) (L)’s supporters here are mostly Dalits who, I found, were generally reluctant to talk about the “laal jhanda” preferences.

Women queue up to vote in Vishunpura, a Dalit-majority village.

It’s difficult to say what works best for Siwan. While Left parties routinely manage decent number of votes in all of Siwan’s eight constituencies, their chances of winning seats here (or anywhere else) are rather remote. If Janata comes to power, it might make Shahabuddin more powerful. Though, since he will continue to languish in jail, it’s unlikely he’ll yield as much influence as he did in his prime. If BJP wins Bihar, Siwan risks getting more polarised in the near future.

The least worse outcome for Siwan, a medicine shop owner told me, would be that both Janata and NDA win four seats each here: “development should be a priority, but we first need to sort out more basic things — security of life, for example.”