As Rahul Gandhi's Voter Adhikar Yatra wraps up, will revival of Congress in Bihar hold ground?

Patna: The Election Commission may be asking him to file an affidavit to substantiate his charges of ‘vote theft’. The NDA leaders may be berating him for making wild charges against the ruling dispensation as well as the constitutional bodies. But an unperturbed Rahul Gandhi, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, has done what many of the Congress top leadership could not do in the last three decades.

The former Congress president has single-handedly, through his much-publicised Voter Adhikar Yatra, infused a new lease of life into the party in Bihar which was gasping for breath ever since it was ousted from power in March 1990.

Rahul, through his 15-day yatra, which focused primarily on ‘vote theft’ and overshadowed the BJP’s Hindutva and temple agenda, has resurrected the grand old party after traversing through 1300 kms across 25 districts in Bihar and covering 110 Assembly constituencies.

Planned meticulously and executed with clinical precision, the yatra has left the NDA and I.N.D.I.A. allies awe-struck how a moribund Congress has shown resilience and is today relatively in a stronger position to drive a hard bargain with the RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav for a decent number of seats.

“Rahul has, in fact, killed three birds with one stone. On the one hand, he used the fault-lines within the SIR (Special Intensive Revision) to put the Election Commission and the BJP in the dock. Secondly, by traversing from Sasaram in the west to Araria in the east, Rahul has infused a new lease of life into the Congress which was politically defunct in this part of the cow-belt. Thirdly, by resurrecting the Congress, Rahul is now in a position to drive a hard bargain with the RJD leadership for a respectable number of seats for the Assembly elections, slated for November this year,” opined veteran political scientist and editor of a national magazine Giridhar Jha.

The political expert dwelt at length how Tejashwi, prior to Voter Adhikar Yatra, was reluctant to give more than 50 seats out of 243 Assembly constituencies to the Congress, given its poor track record of victory in the 2020 Assembly elections.

“During the 2020 polls, the Congress could win merely 19 out of 70 seats allotted to it precisely because we were given such seats which were not winnable. But after Rahul’s 15-days of yatra, the mood is buoyant in the grand old party. We now expect Congress to get a respectable amount of seats as part of seat-sharing talks with the RJD,” averred former Bihar Congress president and ex-minister Ram Jatan Sinha.