With poorest strike rate, Congress is now more of a liability for Tejashwi

Guess whose strike rate was the poorest among all the five alliance partners in the Mahagatbandhan? The answer is Congress.

While the rest of the allies had a strike rate of over 50 per cent, the Congress managed to scrape through in merely 19 seats out of 70 constituencies it contested, with a strike rate of 27 per cent.

Sources in the Mahagatbandhan told Deccan Herald in Patna on Wednesday that Tejashwi Yadav was almost on the verge of dumping the Congress two days before the seat pact was sealed within the Grand Alliance in October. But the timely intervention by Congress top leadership, including Rahul Gandhi, saved the day for the grand old party.

It is this grand old party, which is now being held squarely responsible for Tejashwi missing the bus.

“The Congress party has a moribund organisation with a rudderless leadership. It has more leaders than workers. Yet it started flexing its muscles when we were not ready to give it more than 50 seats. Eventually, it extracted its pound of flesh and got 70 seats out of 243 constituencies to contest. However, it lost 51 seats. Had it won even 27, the number it won in 2015, today we would have formed the Mahagatbadhan Government,” the senior RJD functionary, who has worked closely with Lalu Prasad Yadav as well as Tejashwi, told Deccan Herald.

Refusing to be identified, the senior leader averred that had Tejashwi allotted more seats to the Left, which has cadre at the grass-roots level, things would have been quite different.

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“The CPI-ML strike rate is exemplary with 11 wins out of the 19 seats, the finest ever performance by any Left party in recent times. Had we given Congress and the Left 50 seats each, and contested the remaining 143, we would have crossed the magic figure of 122, instead of getting stuck at 110,” said the RJD source.

Besides, Congress's own house is also not in proper order. It never made any major poll preparedness. It had no well-oiled organisation to run the campaign. The poll campaign by a listless Rahul Gandhi was such that out of eight rallies the former Congress president addressed (covering 52 seats), the party could win only three: Hisua, Kishanganj and Araria.

Star campaigners like Shatrughan Sinha and Tariq Anwar remained stars on paper. They failed to infuse a new lease of life into a struggling organisation like Congress. About the Congress Working Committee member Meira Kumar, there is nothing much to be said. The daughter of former Deputy PM Jagjiwan Ram reportedly did not even campaign for the party which made her the Lok Sabha Speaker from 2009 to 2014.