Battered by defeat & ‘lack of coordination’, Congress-RJD alliance unravels in Bihar

While RJD state chief Mangani Mandal says Congress is free to exit alliance, the latter has said tie-up was ‘only for elections’ and that it plans to focus on strengthening itself.

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi and RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav during Voter Adhikar Yatra in Bihar. The chill between the parties began during the yatra, say leaders | Photo: X/ANI

New Delhi: Within three weeks of the Opposition’s drubbing in the Bihar assembly elections, the Congress-RJD alliance in the state has effectively unravelled, with senior leaders in both parties trading blame for the defeat, and some even taking their sparring public.

Sources said the Congress high command has instructed the state leadership to focus on strengthening its presence at the grassroots-level. This comes amid a growing clamour in the lower ranks that the party’s association with the RJD had become its biggest “stumbling block”.

On Monday, Bihar Pradesh Congress Committee president Rajesh Ram’s remarks signalled the strain in ties when he dismissed as “irrelevant” any question on the future of the alliance. Ram, who failed to retain his own seat, said the tie-up was “only for elections”.

“The challenge before me is to strengthen my organisation. Alliances are made for elections, which are not due anytime soon. So, any discussion on the alliance is not relevant at this point,” Ram said. He was responding to a question about RJD state chief Mangani Lal Mandal’s comment that the Congress was free to exit the alliance if it wished so.

Last Saturday, Mandal had squarely blamed the Congress for the Opposition’s crushing defeat and challenged it to contest future elections alone to understand its real strength. He claimed that the six seats the Congress won were secured only because of the RJD’s support base.

Responding to Mandal Tuesday, Ram said: “If we contested 61 seats and won six, even they won only 26 of the 147 they contested. It is a collective defeat. Everyone has lost, not just us.”

Congress insiders said the party is not particularly perturbed by the RJD’s attitude. The Bihar unit has already received instructions from the high command to draw up a strategy that follows an independent political and organisational line.

“Many state leaders tried to impress upon the leadership even before the elections that staying aligned with the RJD might harm the party in the long term. We pointed out that the Congress cannot continue to rely on a party that pushed it to the margins in the first place,” a senior Bihar Congress leader told ThePrint Tuesday.

According to the leader, at the party meeting in Delhi last week to review its poll performance, the high command finally appeared receptive to this view. The state unit was directed to follow the policy of “ekla chalo” (walk alone) for the time being.

“The manner in which the RJD refused to withdraw its candidates from certain seats and forced so-called friendly fights, even after the Congress accepted Tejashwi Yadav as the alliance’s chief ministerial candidate, shows the contempt with which it treats us,” the Congress leader said.

At the meeting, many contestants also rued the lack of coordination among the allies during the polls.

Ahead of the elections, a senior office-bearer of the Congress, who has always been against any alliance with the RJD, had told ThePrint: “You ask why the Congress keeps sinking in Bihar? Because it is sacrificing its future for short-term gains. Tell me, how can you grow a party in a constituency when you don’t even know whether your candidate will get to contest from there? Khet toh hamara poora banjar hai (our entire field lies fallow).”

The Congress, which last won an election in Bihar in 1985 and has since been a marginal force in the state’s politics, eclipsed first by the rise of RJD’s Lalu Prasad and later by JD(U)’s Nitish Kumar, registered a strike rate of just 9.8 percent in the polls this time. This is close to its worst performance in 2010, when it won four seats.

Congress leaders involved in the Bihar campaign now say the chill in relations with the RJD began during the Voter Adhikar Yatra led by senior leader Rahul Gandhi in September.

After the yatra, Gandhi travelled to South America and returned to Bihar only in the last week of October, by which time seat-sharing talks had turned bitter. During the campaign, Gandhi and Tejashwi Yadav addressed only a handful of joint rallies, and the warmth seen during the launch of the yatra was missing.

(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)