LUCKNOW: Samajwadi Party broke its Bihar ties with Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad on Thursday — a move that helps Bharatiya Janata Party in the poll-bound state and is being seen as having in part been a result of back-channel efforts by the saffron party.The official reason cited by SP was differences over seat-sharing with the JDU-RJD alliance. SP supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav, the main mover and shaker of the Janata Parivar reunion experiment, had last week skipped the rally of the alliance partners in Patna.Late on Thursday evening, JD (U) chief Sharad Yadav held an hour-long meeting with Mulayam. He later told news agency ANI that SP will stay on in the Grand Alliance. Politicians familiar with the matter told ET this Janata Parivar divorce is attributable to several back-channel parleys between SP and BJP.A significant role, one leader said, was played by a close relative of a well-known media personality. Another leader said there were meetings between Mulayam and his cousin Ram Gopal Yadav and BJP’s top leadership in the past week. Though SP is not a big player in Bihar, any possible split in the Yadav votes could help BJP.The saffron party’s success in Jharkhand and Maharashtra polls were attributed to the split in the rival camps. All ground reports from Bihar suggest a Yadav consolidation behind Lalu Prasad. Any fracture in the grand anti-BJP alliance, however small, is likely to help BJP in its tough fight.Meanwhile, in Bihar, former minister and Rashtriya Janata Dal vice-president Raghunath Jha resigned from the party’s primary membership on Thursday.Jha, considered RJD’s Brahmin face, is set to join SP. The timing of Jha’s resignation coincided with SP’s decision to exit the Grand Alliance and could open the possibility of a third front in Bihar. But SP could at best hope to split votes and provide a platform for dissidents during the polls.SP, the ruling party in Uttar Pradesh, had little at stake in neighbouring Bihar where it contested 146 seats in the 2010 polls and lost deposits in all. But the Opposition in UP, particularly Bahujan Samaj Party, attributes SP’s U-turn to “a deal” with BJP.“This has been done at the instigation of BJP. Mulayam Singh Yadav recently met Prime Minister Narendra Modi . The SP leadership has been in touch with BJP to weaken the secular forces in Bihar,” said Bahujan Samaj Party’s Uttar Pradesh President Ram Achal Rajbhar.Mulayam had met PM Modi on August 27 and soon thereafter the first rumblings of a rupture within the Janata Parivar began. While Mulayam’s meeting with Modi was ostensibly over issues related to Governor Ram Naik’s “activism” in UP, sources within SP said Bihar elections too came up for discussion.Mulayam’s cousin and SP General Secretary Ram Gopal Yadav met BJP President Amit Shah on August 31. And on Thursday, Ram Gopal addressed a press conference announcing a break-up with the Janata Dal (United)-RJD alliance in Bihar.But he denied the break-up had anything to do with his meeting with Shah and the Central Bureau of Investigation’s probe on Noida chief engineer Yadav Singh.“We have nothing to fear in the Yadav Singh case. Everyone knows who Yadav Singh was close to. It has nothing to do with our breaking up with the Maha Gathbandhan alliance in Bihar. We were given very few seats than expected. And our party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav was not even consulted about the seatsharing formula. We came to know of it through the media and decided to walk out of the alliance,” Ram Gopal Yadav said. He said the Janata Parivar was dead now, and there was only Samajwadi Parivar left now. Yadav said SP will field candidates in a large number of seats in Bihar and may also enter into an alliance with some regional and national parties. Sharad Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party had also walked out of the Maha Gathbandhan recently. SP and NCP’s Tariq Anwar are said to be in talks for an alliance in Bihar. Interestingly, Mulayam and RJD chief Lalu Prasad are now related to each other. Lalu’s daughter Raj Laxmi married Mulayam’s nephew Tej Pratap Yadav earlier this year and the wedding was attended by PM Modi in Saifai.