Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge (L) with LoP in the Lok Sabha and party leader Rahul Gandhi.
Credit: PTI Photo
New Delhi: Bihar Congress leaders on Thursday told the party central leadership that the Rs 10,000 cash transfer by the Nitish Kumar to women beneficiaries, delay in seat-sharing by I.N.D.I.A bloc, shifting of candidates and discrepancies in list, internal rift, Special Intensive Revision (SIR) and electoral malpractices were among the reasons for the party's debacle.
Some leaders also highlighted the “Owaisi factor” in Seemanchal region as well as in other places where AIMIM split Muslim votes, which impacted the prospects of the I.N.D.I.A alliance candidates.
Congress won only six of the 60 seats it contested in the Assembly elections earlier this month.
At a review meeting here, the candidates who successfully and unsuccessfully contested the elections met party chief Mallikarjun Kharge, Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha and Rahul Gandhi and General Secretary (Organisation) KC Venugopal to provide their side of the story as the party tried to make sense of the poor show by the I.N.D.I.A bloc.
Besides the candidates, the leadership also met with Bihar Congress chief Rajesh Ram, Bihar in-charge Krishna Allavaru, Congress MPs Akhilesh Prasad Singh and Tariq Anwar, and Independent MP from Purnia Pappu Yadav. There were reports of an altercation between two candidates but Pappu Yadav claimed these reports were "false".
After the four-hour-long meeting, Venugopal said the leaders and candidates from Bihar made "one thing absolutely clear" that the Bihar election was "not a genuine mandate, but a grossly managed and fabricated outcome".
He said they highlighted how SIR enabled targeted voter deletions and dubious additions, how "blatant cash bribery" was used to influence voters even at polling stations, and how identical margins across constituencies "exposed a pattern that no independent election commission would ever overlook".
"These issues point to organised electoral malpractices and brazen violations of the Model Code of Conduct, carried out under the watch of an ECI that has increasingly behaved like an active collaborator in BJP’s election rigging. What happened in Bihar is nothing short of a direct assault on democracy," he said.
Rajesh Ram told reporters that scheme workers were deployed in polling stations on polling day for a campaign by the Nitish government. Allavaru said the issue of "buying votes" and "subversion of the election process" were discussed during the meeting.
Bihar Congress leader Musavir Alam said "Owaisi factor" was prevalent in Seemanchal and he along with the BJP set a narrative that had an impact not only on Seemanchal but also on other districts and other areas of Bihar.
Congress candidate Tauquir Alam complained that the delayed shifting to Barari did not help him. "If my name had been announced 10-15 days earlier, I could have covered.We got a lot of support in such a short time, but we could not win. There are many reasons for this, including transfer of Rs 10,000," he claimed.
Congress' Araria MLA Abidur Rahman said, "the alliance could not be formed at the right time. There was a friendly contest in 10-11 seats, which sent the wrong message to the public. The spread of religious and caste frenzy had an impact." He also claimed that there were differences between young and old party leaders.
Ram, the Bihar president who lost his Kutumba seat, said there was no decline in the vote share of the alliance and the Congress. "Our defeat was mainly influenced by the central government, and now that we have done an internal review, we should focus on rebuilding our organisation with new methods," he said.