“Haan main Bihar se chunav ladunga…Bihar ke liye ladunga (Yes, I will contest from Bihar; in fact, I will fight for Bihar),” Chirag Paswan said, confirming his plans for the upcoming Bihar election, during a public address in June. It was his first public address after confirming his intent to contest the upcoming Bihar Assembly elections. Many political commentaries have called this Chirag’s symbolic departure from the national stage to the heart of state politics.
All eyes are on the upcoming assembly polls in Bihar. Dates for the elections are expected to be officially announced sometime next week. For now, Chirag has not revealed the constituency. The only certainty is that Bihar is his next political battleground.
At 43, Chirag Paswan currently represents Hajipur in Parliament. The seat was once synonymous with his father, the late Ram Vilas Paswan, who won it eight times over a political career spanning five decades. Ram Vilas, a formidable Dalit leader, served in multiple Union Cabinets, working with prime ministers across political divides. Chirag, by contrast, appears intent on charting a more localised path. With the state polls around the corner, let’s take a look and understand where Chirag Paswan stands ahead of assembly elections and his role in state politics so far, among other things.
From Bollywood to Bihar
Born in 1983, Chirag studied at the National Institute of Open Schooling and briefly pursued a B.Tech in Computer Engineering at IET Jhansi before dropping out. According to the Election Commission, his declared net worth stands at Rs 2.68 crore.
It is not often that a search result for a politician leads you to an IMDb page. Before entering politics, Chirag briefly flirted with Bollywood. His 2011 debut, ‘Miley Naa Miley Hum’, opposite (now-fellow Parliamentarian) Kangana Ranaut, sank without a trace. And Chirag has been objective about his acting stint.
In an interview with ANI in 2024, Chirag said that before the country could call him a “disaster”, he knew how bad an actor he was. “It was a different time. I can’t say if it was difficult or easy. No one from my family has ever been to Bollywood. In a filmy way I can say, ‘Meri saat pushto ka film se koi naata nai raha’.”
A year after his first and last film, he joined the Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) in 2012. The death of Ram Vilas Paswan in 2020 thrust the responsibility of preserving his political legacy onto Chirag. Though both the Lok Janshakti Party and the Paswan family fractured a year later in 2021, Chirag managed to retain his political relevance by emerging as the BJP’s preferred ally in Bihar.
In the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections, Chirag firmly dismissed any possibility of reconciliation with his uncle, Pashupati Kumar Paras and cousin Prince Raj, holding them directly accountable for the split in the party his father founded.
‘Bihar mujhe bula raha hai’
If 2020 marked the year Chirag inherited the mantle of his father’s political legacy, 2025 seems to be the year he defines his own. Months before the Bihar elections, he told reporters in Patna, “Bihar mujhe bula raha hai (Bihar is calling me),” promising to spend more time on the ground than in Delhi.
Some say Chirag represents the “next phase” of Bihar’s politics — younger, media-savvy and unapologetically ambitious. He is also among a new generation of leaders seeking to rebrand regional politics through personal charisma and narrative control, rather than the traditional caste arithmetic.
A fragile alliance
The 2025 Bihar election will see the Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas) contest alongside Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United) and the BJP. The opposition camp — the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), Congress and CPI (ML) — forms the Mahagathbandhan.
But beneath the surface of the NDA alliance lies a history of acrimony. In 2020, Chirag’s campaign slogan “Modi se bair nahi, Nitish teri khair nahi” became a viral war cry that bruised JD(U)’s image. The LJP (then undivided) fielded candidates against Nitish Kumar’s party, weakening it substantially; JD(U) was reduced to just 43 seats in the last polls.