The Congress is bubbling with hope in Bihar after Rahul Gandhi’s Voter Adhikar Yatra, which has given a fresh lease of life to the party that has watched itself being relegated to a marginal player in the state in the past 30 years.
The massive response to the Yatra, which covered 1,300km across 23 districts in 16 days, has also left behind a niggle in the run-up to the Assembly elections — the Congress’s Mahagatbandhan ally, the RJD, is not particularly happy with the focus of the event remaining riveted on Rahul at the cost of Tejashwi Yadav.
“Rahul Gandhi claimed in Patna on Monday that he would drop a hydrogen bomb during the Assembly polls (a reference to an exposé related to the vote-theft campaign). We are wondering if he has already exploded a bomb on us, rather than the NDA,” an RJD MLA said, complaining that Rahul had kept the attention of the masses on himself and never allowed Tejashwi to have the spotlight. The RJD, which helms the Mahagatbandhan, hopes to project Tejashwi as the alliance’s chief ministerial face.
The Yatra in Bihar, where a special intensive revision of electoral rolls has given rise to widespread allegations of an attempt to disenfranchise large sections of voters, was a Rahul show all along. “After a long time, I saw Congress flags outnumbering RJD flags. I had not expected so many people to show so much enthusiasm for our party in Bihar,” senior Congress leader and former minister Kripanath Pathak said.
If there is jubilation in the state Congress, it is because they see a chance of revival after more than three decades. The party, which ruled Bihar for the longest time till 1990, has since then been a minor player. Its support base — consisting of Muslims, Dalits and upper castes, who together make up 35 per cent of the electorate — has gradually depleted in the past three decades.
First, it was the Muslims who found a new messiah in Lalu Prasad in 1990 after the Bhagalpur communal riots. By the end of the decade, the upper caste had shifted to the BJP as the party allied itself with Lalu. The Dalits splintered and found refuge in various parties — the RJD, the BSP and even the BJP.
The Congress gradually found itself piggybacking on others — sometimes the RJD and in 2015, an RJD-JDU combine. The one time it went solo in the Assembly polls was in 2010 when it could win just four of the 243 seats.
Burden of the past
The first thing Rahul has been able to achieve is to dispel the notion that the Congress is merely at the mercy of the RJD. In the 2020 Assembly polls, the Congress had contested as many as 70 seats as part of the Mahagathbandhan. The move hurt the alliance badly as the party won just 19 seats and the Mahagathbandhan (111 seats) ended up losing the elections narrowly to the NDA (125 seats) despite being the favourites.
Lalu was livid. “Because of the Congress, my son Tejashwi could not become chief minister,” the RJD patriarch told this correspondent.
Even after the 2024 Lok Sabha polls in which the NDA bagged 30 of the 40 seats in Bihar, Tejashwi had said the INDIA tie-up was only for the Lok Sabha polls.
There was a buzz that Lalu had offered the Congress just 35 seats for the Assembly elections later this year. “But after the Yatra, it is unlikely that the Congress will agree to anything less than 60. The RJD is wary that if the Congress decides to fight solo, there will be confusion among the Muslims,” said former MLC Prem Kumar Mani, once an aide of chief minister and JDU leader Nitish Kumar.
Mani complimented Rahul for not giving space to Tejashwi by projecting him as the chief ministerial face.
National colour
It was because of Rahul that the Yatra got a national colour. “Had it been only Tejashwi, the movement would have been confined to Bihar,” a Congress MP said.
The chief ministers of Tamil Nadu, Jharkhand and Telangana — M.K. Stalin, Hemant Soren and Ravanth Reddy — former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Akhilesh Yadav and several former Congress chief ministers joined the Yatra, turning it into a show of unity for the INDIA bloc that had been dormant after the Lok Sabha elections.
“Rahul realised that he could not afford to do politics at the same level as Tejashwi. He has to play at the national level,” Pathak said.
Voters’ confidence
The Congress and its supporters have been a demoralised lot in Bihar. “Many of them did not even go to the polling booths. The Yatra has instilled confidence among the voters, and I am sure more people will come out to vote for us in the Assembly polls,” Congress leader Shakeel Ahmad said.
The BJP tried to play down the impact of the Yatra.
“Crowds do not mean votes. The NDA this time is more united than the 2020Assembly polls. The state government has announced freebies, such as increasing the old-age pension from ₹400 to ₹1,100 per month, 125 units of free power and ₹10,000 for every woman. These will decide the voting patterns, not the crowds at the Yatra,” BJP spokesperson Prem Rajan Patel said.
However, many pointed out that the BJP had so far concentrated all its firepower on the RJD and never even mentioned the Congress.
