Asked how he felt that he was now set to lose his ministership, Prakash told The Indian Express, “I was reinducted into the Cabinet only due to the blessings of the NDA leadership. I was made minister as per provisions of the Constitution. I will continue to be a minister as long as I enjoy the NDA leadership’s blessings. I won’t talk about (not getting) the MLC berth.”

BJP sources claimed that Kushwaha had been renominated to the Rajya Sabha earlier this year after he assured he would merge the RLM with the BJP. “BJP’s central leadership had reminded Kushwaha about the merger while considering the reinduction of Kushwaha’s son Deepak Prakash as minister in CM Samrat Choudhary’s Cabinet,” said a BJP insider.

Toughening his stance, Kushwaha told The Indian Express that he cannot merge his party with the BJP “for one position”.

“The RLM has been a separate political entity and will continue to remain so. But let me reiterate that we are very much part of the NDA. I am still hopeful of getting an MLC berth for Deepak,” he said. The former Union Minister had said similar things at an RLM meeting on Sunday.

Kushwaha’s decision to get Prakash inducted as a minister in the Nitish Kumar government ran into problems from his own party last December after three of its four MLAs accused him of “blatantly promoting” his family despite once being a staunch opponent of dynasty politics. They pointed out that while the party chief was in the Rajya Sabha, his wife Snehlata Kushwaha is the fourth MLA of the party, and his son had been made a minister despite not holding a position in the Legislative Council or being elected to the Assembly. A month before that, seven RLM leaders, including some senior functionaries, had quit the party in protest against the decision to make Prakash the minister.

The BJP source also said that the three MLAs — Alok Kumar Singh (Dinara), Rameshwar Mahto (Bajpatti), and Madhaw Anand (Madhubani) — were in touch with the party.

Considered a pan-Bihar Kushwaha (OBC Koeri) leader, Upendra Kushwaha has been increasingly marginalised in the NDA after the BJP elevated fellow Kushwaha leader Samrat Choudhary as CM. Kushwaha was a protege of JD(U) chief Nitish Kumar but fell out with the former CM over his ambition to carve a niche for himself. In the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, the party he had floated earlier, the Rashtriya Lok Samata Party, won all three Lok Sabha seats it contested. In the subsequent Lok Sabha and Assembly polls, he could not make much of an impact but managed to stay afloat as a separate political entity.

A merger and an exit from the JD(U) later, his new party RLM managed to recreate some of that old magic as it won four of the six seats it contested in last year’s Bihar Assembly election amid a wave for the NDA. Yet, Kushwaha does not have much of a bargaining power because of the NDA’s numbers in the current House (202 out of 243 MLAs).