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After stunning defeat in Bihar, doubts rise on Congress' INDIA leadership
A Congress leader admitted the Bihar performance weakens its claim to seats in Hindi belt talks, while partners say the party had relied entirely on RJD’s base
The results of the Bihar election, the sheer scale of the Grand Alliance or Maha Gatbandhan’s defeat results, and the Congress’ inability to win seats in the Hindi heartland will likely alter the politics of the Opposition, INDIA bloc, with a growing clamour for a change in leadership of the group.
The Congress won 6 seats of the 61 it contested in Bihar, for a strike rate of 9.8%.
“It is clear that the Congress can’t stop the BJP. The leadership position must go to a party which has a track record of defeating the BJP. Only Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee has an unblemished record of defeating the BJP. Time has come for Banerjee to lead the Opposition group,” said Trinamool Congress’s Lok Sabha MP Kalyan Banerjee.
Another senior TMC leader pointed out that in six straight elections (three assembly and three Lok Sabha polls) Banerjee has been able to keep the BJP at bay in West Bengal.
For months now, a splinter group of TMC, AAP, Shiv Sena (UBT) and Samajwadi Party had been making its own plans, prioritising regional issues and arriving at a common strategy to focus on their goals instead of following the line of the Congress, which has 99 Lok Sabha seats. Together, these parties have 77 seats in the lower house—enough to form a pressure group within the larger bloc.
One of the prominent manifestations of the sub-group’s own political line was in the 2024 Delhi election when they backed AAP over the Congress in the campaign.
The Bihar debacle comes ahead of a series of key elections starting with Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Assam, Puducherry and Kerala next year, followed by Goa, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat in 2027.
CPIM chief MA Baby suggested introspection of the parties, individually, and as a group. “INDIA bloc wanted to fight Bihar poll and wanted to send a message to the country by defeating the BJP. But it didn’t happen. We need to discuss the results within each party and then collectively at a meeting of the bloc. The “vote chor, gaddi chhor” campaign was well-planned, but the voters didn’t respond to the campaign. His reference is to Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s efforts to present the outcome of recent elections as the result of large-scale manipulation by the BJP, an exercise that has failed to capture the imagination of people.
Analysts said the results of the Bihar election would influence the extent to which partners of the Congress in states such as Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal are willing to share seats with it.
The results, a Congress leader admitted, will drastically hamper the party’s negotiating powers within the alliance. “We bargained hard for 61 seats in Bihar. But our performance may not help us to bargain hard for extra seats in Uttar Pradesh or other Hindi-belt states.”
Much of that also has to do with the fact that the Congress has no base in Bihar, suggested an analyst. “In Uttar Pradesh, the Congress could still be beneficial to the Samajwadi Party,” said Manindra Thakur, a political analyst at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University. ” In Bihar, the Congress entirely banked on RJD.”
There are more troubling indications in the Bihar results for the INDIA bloc, said another Opposition leader who asked not to be named. Pointing to the AIMIM winning in 5 seats in the Seemanchal region, he said: “It underlines that a section of Muslim voters are looking beyond INDIA bloc for electoral options.”
