Bihar Congress Shrugging Off Dust To Emerge As A Force Before Assembly Election 2025

Patna: Congress is often accused of piggybacking on the RJD to remain a force to reckon with ever since it lost power in Bihar in 1990.

In the last 2020 assembly election, its vote share was 9.48 percent but it could win only 19 out of 70 seats it contested. Grand Alliance’s seat tally in the last election was 110, only 12 seats short of the majority mark. Congress’s poor strike rate was also held responsible for the alliance missing a chance to form the government in the state.

Now, RJD is wary of conceding a good number of seats to the grand old party due to its dismal performance in the last election when having a better option in CPI (ML), which won 12 out of 19 seats it contested.

Lack of strong state leaders

Congress, once a formidable force in the 1980s lost its clout slowly as one of the many reasons for its decline, is attributed to its failure to project a strong OBC face in the state. The Mandal politics which started dominating the state`s political landscape with the emergence of Lalu Prasad and Nitish Kumar as strong OBC leaders, thus limiting the space for the Congress, remarked a political analyst.

During the 1980s, Congress had a strong OBC face in Ram Lakhan Singh Yadav, but the grand old party failed to establish a strong OBC leader in the state in the subsequent decades, remarked former professor of Tata Institute of Social Sciences Pushpendra Kumar Singh.

Firebrand Congress leader and former JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar, who is a Bhumihar (a politically dominate caste), has a potential to emerge as a formidable leader in the state as his ‘Palyan Roko, Naukri Do Yatra’ (stop migration, give jobs journey) also got a good traction, he added.

His popularity among youths was also on rise but he lost the steam once his Yatra stopped, he noted, adding that RJD perhaps does not want any young leader to get a strong footing when Tejashwi Yadav is there.

Trying to expand social base

Congress is also making its concerted efforts to expand its support base among its traditional vote bank of Dalits by appointing Rajesh Ram as a state Congress president.

Congress cannot claim it has a good influence over a particular segment of the society like Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar can claim that it has a good support base among women or for that matter other parties do have, commented the political analyst.

Congress lost its support among Muslims after the 1989 Bhagalpur riots, and also did not project any Muslim leaders later to win back their support. Congress legislative party leader Shakeel Ahmed Khan, who is a two-time Kadwa (Katihar) MLA, is a promising leader but the party also did not encash on it as it should have, remarked the political analyst.