RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav (left) with Congress leader Rahul Gandhi.
Credit: PTI File Photo
New Delhi: Battered by the rout in Bihar, the Opposition is blaming ‘vote chori’ but the root of the debacle may lie in an incoherent campaign, discord within the I.N.D.I.A. bloc, one-upmanship by the RJD and moreover an inability to design a narrative against Nitish Kumar and a credible alternative to him.
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At the national level, the Bihar results will further trouble the I.N.D.I.A. bloc in its fight as it will be fragmented with the Congress, Left and Trinamool Congress all set to contest against each other in Kerala and West Bengal. Any joint action will have to wait at least till May next year.
The opposition partners can find solace in their Bihar vote share not deviating violently like the number of seats its opponents garnered in the Assembly polls compared to five years ago.
On the face of it, the I.N.D.I.A. bloc could not add any caste or community to its side while the opponents consolidated its grip over its traditional vote bank, be it caste or groups like women and youth. Also, it will have to think about why people did not buy their campaign themes on jobs and social security.
The Opposition is likely to bring in Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, which saw deletion of around 68 lakh voters from the previous rolls and subsequent addition of around 26 lakh voters, as the sole reason for the outcome but it would find it difficult to convince a voter their side of the story.
While the ‘Voter Adhikar Yatra’ by Congress’ campaigner-in-chief Rahul Gandhi and RJD scion Tejashwi Yadav brought party cadre together, an absence of subsequent joint actions took away whatever gains accrued to the opposition alliance.
Rahul and Tejashwi, who criss-crossed Bihar in August second-half, could not find time to jointly campaign for the elections would tell what went wrong for the I.N.D.I.A. bloc in a nutshell. They held just two joint rallies on a single day – on October 29 – during the entire campaign and did not meet again.
One would have believed that there would be a repeat of what Rahul and Samajwadi Party’s Akhilesh Yadav pulled off in Uttar Pradesh during the Lok Sabha elections last year but mutual suspicion between the two majors in the Bihar alliance appeared to have sealed their fate.
The I.N.D.I.A. bloc almost wasted two months after the conclusion of yatra on September 1 – except for the release of the manifesto for Extremely Backward Classes, which the alliance thought would dump Nitish for them, in a hotel on September 24 – by not going to the ground with a common purpose.
And when they came together in the midst of campaign on October 23 to announce Tejashwi as the Chief Ministerial face, it was preceded by high drama with Vikassheel Insaan Party (VIP) chief Mukesh Sahani raising the alliance managers’ heartbeats by initially refusing to join the programme.
Sahani was made Deputy Chief Ministerial face but his party, which claims the support of the Nishads, failed to add anything to the alliance, if one looks at the numbers and the VIP too fared badly in the polls, not opening its account.
On its part, the Congress played the hardball by not endorsing Tejashwi as the face till the last minute, cribbing about RJD’s tactical indifference to them citing its 2020 performance.
RJD’s one-upmanship of projecting just Tejashwi – on banners and even naming the manifesto ‘Tejashwi’s Pran’ (Tejashwi’s Resolve) – and not a united front also added to the discomfort. CPI(ML)L expressed its reservation over not consulting allies over manifesto projection.
The question now remains is whether the Opposition bloc will have a sincere postmortem on what went wrong or will they settle for a blame game.