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What swung the vote in Bihar polls: Campaigning
After Haryana and Maharashtra, Bihar is third consecutive election after the 2024 general election where the Oppn campaign lost its way after a promising start
Sometime this autumn, it appeared that the Opposition’s Grand Alliance was peaking at the right time. Out on a joint yatra to protest the controversial special intensive revision of electoral rolls, Rahul Gandhi and Tejashwi Yadav appeared to complement each other’s campaign styles and drew huge crowds. At one rally, Yadav called Gandhi his big brother who had to be made Prime Minister, at another, they walked side by side, grinning, and at a third, both rode a jeep together, with Yadav in the driver’s seat. The hope was the camaraderie would give extra fuel to the alliance that had fallen tantalisingly short – a mere 13,000-odd votes separated the two coalitions – five years ago.
Five weeks before the elections, it all fell apart. As days ticked by and the National Democratic Alliance put its house in order after initial squabbles, the Grand Alliance was consumed by infighting and was unable to even publicly announce a seat-share deal. Party symbols were handed over to candidates in the morning and then withdrawn at night. One ally put up a previous spoiler candidate in the bastion of another. Gandhi and Yadav refused to talk and resolve the issue – this newspaper reported that bitterness had crept into their relationship – and the Congress’s management savvy ticket manager was nearly thrashed by ticket aspirants. The announcement of Yadav as the alliance’s chief ministerial pick was delayed over the dissension and when the declaration came, it was juxtaposed with the surprising (suicidal in retrospect) announcement of Mukesh Sahani as deputy chief ministerial pick – another decision taken because of last-minute machinations and over the express disapproval of at least one major ally.
Eventually when Gandhi and Yadav appeared together in rallies, the old bonhomie was missing. There was no common campaign theme. Yadav spoke about jobs and turning the page on old allegations of poor law and order. He asked the audience to make him CM. Gandhi spoke about alleged irregularities in voter rolls, his opposition to the SIR, and urged the electorate to uphold democratic ideals. Between the transactionalism of the RJD and the rhetoric of the Congress, the campaign floundered. In at least 12 seats, allies faced each other. On Friday, the NDA won all of these seats.
Of course, this played out against the backdrop of a cohesive NDA campaign that coalesced behind Nitish Kumar’s face as CM after initial hiccups and Prime Minister Narendra Modi relentlessly hammered the Opposition over the RJD’s past governance record. The NDA made the election into a referendum on Jungle Raj even as the Opposition’s listless campaign failed to capitalise on Kumar’s anti-incumbency. Instead, the RJD attempted to garner sympathy by saying the BJP was planning to dump Kumar after the elections, but it neither helped project the Opposition as the governance alternative nor drove a wedge in the NDA. And the ruling coalition managed to trump the jobs pitch of the RJD by formalising tens of thousands of jobs, especially for women, days before the polls.
After Haryana and Maharashtra, Bihar is the third consecutive state election after the 2024 general elections where the Opposition’s campaign has lost its way after a promising start. In all three, the Opposition began promisingly but quickly devolved into bickering over seats that the principals didn’t deem important enough to resolve – in Haryana, the Congress let disagreements between the Hoodas and the Dalit leaders simmer, and in Maharashtra, the INDIA bloc wasted precious campaign time in protracted alliance negotiations. In all three, the Opposition believed that its assembly poll pitch could just be a facsimile of the Lok Sabha campaign without tuning into local issues and crafting an organic movement. Bihar’s crushing loss has shown that the people aren’t taking any of it.
