“Kahe ka chunao? Hamara MP to mantri hai,” booms the voice of Santosh Choudhary as he watches another group of people march by, asking the people to vote for their party.

Like Chowdhury, many residents of Deoghar are wondering why they have to go through another election on December 12.

After the bifurcation of Bihar when Jharkhand was carved out, some Assembly segments, which were earlier within the Godda parliamentary constituency, went to Bihar while some remained in the new state.

But most of the voters in Godda are unaware of this change in geographical demarcation. Hence, many of them think that Digvijay Singh, minister of state for external affairs, continues to be their member of Parliament, which is not the case anymore because a few new Assembly segments have been added while some of the old ones have been detached.

For the district administration, conducting the bypoll would be easier than it would be for the political parties to convince the electorate to vote for them.

The Deoghar Assembly segment, located more than 78 km from Godda, has been incorporated within the Godda parliamentary constituency.

In undivided Bihar, Deoghar was within Banka Lok Sabha constituency.

Banka is now in Bihar while the Mahagama Assembly segment, which was part of the Bhagalpur Lok Sabha seat in Bihar, is now attached to Godda. Two other Assembly segments — Chakai (Jamui) and Dhoriya (Banka), which were within Godda in undivided Bihar, were separated after the formation of Jharkhand.

Suresh Prasad, an STD booth owner at Jasidih, was not aware of the bypoll as campaigning is yet to gather momentum. He was surprised to know that the Assembly segment represented by RJD legislator Suresh Paswan had been attached to Godda.

Shopkeeper Bimal Singh was extremely upset to learn that their leader, Digvijay Singh, had no influence over the segment. Singh, who won the Banka Lok Sabha seat in the last election, contributed a lot to the development of the area during his tenure as the junior railway minister.

“Jharkhand has taken away our leader, who introduced several new trains and laid new tracks to connect Deoghar with many other parts of the country. Can a new member of Parliament do the same for the area like Singh has done?” he said.

The addition and deletion of Assembly segments could play a crucial role in the outcome of the elections.

The BJP has fielded Pradip Yadav as its candidate to counter the RJD’s backward class support base in the region.

The BJP nominee is expected to eat into the voteshare of the RJD’s Sanjay Yadav and this, observers said, could help the JMM, which has maintained that it would fight the elections alone.