No Takers for Rahul Gandhi’s Anarchic Campaign

 ON NOVEMBER 14, Congress was decimated in Bihar’s electoral arena. The party won a mere six out of 61 seats it had contested, dragging the Mahagathbandhan coalition to political doom. While the results trickled in on November 14, the epitaph was etched months ago.

Three days before the final phase of polling in Bihar on No­vember 11, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, the face of his party’s campaign in the state, paid an impromptu visit to Pachmarhi in Madhya Pradesh. The visit, ostensibly for the party’s ‘Sangathan Srijan’ campaign, or organisation rejuvenation campaign, instead caught attention for Gandhi’s visit to Panarpani in the Satpura Tiger Reserve. After the visit, he returned to Bihar the same day and ad­dressed rallies in Kishanganj and Purnia but by then the damage had been done. Gandhi, for all purposes, was said to be on a holiday in the middle of a crucial and bitterly contested election campaign.

The same story took place the prior week when, on November 5, Gandhi made stunning allegations about “vote chori” in Delhi, claiming a “theft” of 25 lakh votes in Haryana, a claim that was de­bunked in newspaper reports the next day.

In the midst of chasing tigers in a forest reserve and alleging vote thefts in a political arena far off from Bihar, it became confusing for ordinary Indians to understand where Gandhi was fighting a politi­cal battle: in Bihar or elsewhere?

When the results arrived, this politics of floating in the ether bore bitter fruit. Far from being a leading party on Bihar’s political firmament, the Congress was trounced at the hustings and its vote share of 8.76 per cent remained consistent with the historical trend observed over the past quarter century. None of its known faces in the state, and there are not many in its ranks, won. Worse, soon after the second phase of polling was over on November 11, one of its leaders— “known face”— Shakeel Ahmad, quit the party. He was miffed at the manner in which tickets were distributed and the campaign was organised. What made the debacle even more em­barrassing was that this once proud national party ended up at par or even less compared to some sub-regional political parties. Eerily enough, the Congress’ vote share and seats tally in 2025 were quite similar to what it garnered in 2010: 8.37 per cent vote share and five seats. The 2025 results were a reversion of sorts, indicating the deep rut the party finds itself in Bihar.

Even when the scale of the electoral disaster became obvious, his party spokespersons blamed constitutional authorities like the Election Commission of India (ECI) for their defeat, parroting their leader’s accusations. These allegations, needless to say, cut no ice with Bihar’s voters. The party’s woes are the direct result of its campaign, one that did not find traction on the ground with voters. When Gandhi began his ‘Voter Adhikar Yatra’ on August 17 in Sa­saram, he exuded energy and confidence for which his yatras have become famous. Originally, the campaign was to begin earlier, but Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader Tejashwi Yadav could not attend the planned rally. At Sasaram, both leaders addressed a large crowd. Gandhi, in his trademark style, said, “this is a fight to save the Consti­tution. The RSS and the BJP are trying to wipe out the Constitution from India.” He went on to allude that all opinion polls pointed to an I.N.D.I.A. bloc victory in Maharashtra last year. Barely four months after the alliance had won in the Lok Sabha elections, BJP swept the Assembly polls. “Wherever there are elections, they [BJP] win.”

These themes resonated in his speeches and interactions in the 16-day campaign that culminated in the historic Gandhi maidan in Patna on September 1. In all, the yatra covered 22 loca­tions across 20 districts, traversing 1,300km. After that, Gandhi de­cided to take a break, leaving the question of seat distribution and negotiations with allies to local and other Congress leaders, such Krishna Allavaru, the All-India Congress Committee in-charge for Bihar. By the time the deadline for the nominations for the second phase of polling ended on October 20, seat-sharing arrangements between Congress and RJD, the lead party of the Mahagathband­han, had not been ironed out. The two parties could not agree on who would contest in a number of constituencies making a friendly fight in these places inevitable. Not that these fights mattered in the final analysis as the gap in seats won by the Mahagath­bandhan and NDA was so large that these fights paled in significance. But the point was obvious: the Congress became a drag on the coalition and instead of adding, it detracted from the coalition’s chances.

Days before the end of the nomina­tions for the second phase, Allavaru, a former consultant at BCG and KPMG India, faced heckling and protests along with other Congress leaders at Patna airport. Allegations of ‘ticket sales’ and favouritism plagued the party’s decisions on candidates. Allavaru was at the centre of it all.

By the time Gandhi finished his Voter Adhikar Yatra cam­paign—Allavaru was a moving force behind the yatra—Congress misread the message from the campaign. Not only did it demand more seats—way more than it could possibly win—from RJD, it also refused to endorse Tejashwi as the chief ministerial face of the Mahagathbandhan. That led to a distinct cooling of relations and campaign coordination between the two parties. This was evident during the later stages of the yatra. Congress, in the midst of a keenly contested election, continued to demand ‘quality’ seats, signalling a vocabulary in politics that has a distinctly urban, upper-class touch to it. It cut no ice with its coalition partners who have to survive in the roughest political patch to be found anywhere in India.

 Finally, two days after the nominations for the second phase came to an end, Congress dispatched its time-tested troubleshooter, former Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot, to smoothen mat­ters with the RJD leadership. Gehlot met Tejashwi and Lalu Prasad at their home in a well-advertised meeting. Congress finally agreed to Tejashwi as the alliance’s chief ministerial face.

After the meeting Gehlot said, “The Mahagathbandhan is fight­ing the elections as a united front. There are minor issues on 5-7 seats due to local dynamics, and friendly contests may occur in a few constituencies, but this is not unusual in a large alliance.” By then, the first phase of polling was just a fortnight away and the final phase, a mere two days ahead. In an election that was billed as a fight for the very soul of India and its Constitution, this was a strangely lackadaisical approach to a key fight on the way to 2029.

Over time, under Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s watch, Bihar has steadily progressed from a society racked by lawlessness to one where aspirations, largely economic, now dominate the ordinary person’s wish list. Foremost among them are jobs. Tejashwi ’s pitch for one government job for every household is clearly unrealistic from an administrative and governance perspective but viewed from the vantage of a society that still remains one of the poorest in India and where a large section still ekes out a precarious existence, the longing for a government job, which comes with assured salary and stability, is not hard to understand.

BJP and JD(U) countered this, so to speak, with their own pitch for a sense of economic security to households through the ‘Mukhyamantri Mahila Rozgar Yojana’ that involves a one-time grant of `10,000 to women. This “dus hazari” scheme has made waves in the state. But unlike other states where such schemes are the start of fiscally ruinous and continuous hand-outs, further roll­out of cash is contingent on women starting a business.

In contrast to these, grounded, electoral appeals to voters that target different demographic sections in Bihar—youth (RJD) and women (BJP and JD-U), Congress made no such viable appeal. In­stead, Gandhi focused on “saving the Constitution”, “vote chori”, and “exclusions” under the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. As a strategy, this was unviable in a state Assembly election, especially in a state as socially fragmented as Bihar where a pitch has to be made to virtually every section, caste group and demographic, if a party has to gain political traction. Such appeals may sound attractive to a certain section in New Delhi but even at the national level, such appeals have a dubious utility. At the state-level, they are downright counterproductive. Yet, that is the path that Gandhi and his party chose to tread upon in Bihar.

Seen from the party’s performance in the last quarter-century in the state, there is nothing unusual in what has transpired in the 2025 campaign. The last time the party’s vote share crossed double digits was exactly 25 years ago, in the Assembly elections held in 2000, when it garnered 11.06 per cent of the vote. That year, it man­aged to win nine of the 57 seats it contested. Since then, its vote share has fluctuated from a low of 5 per cent in the February 2005 elections (when it won 10 of the 84 seats it contested, forfeiting its deposit in 58 constituencies) to a high of 9.48 per cent in 2020 when it won 19 of the 70 seats it contested.

The last time the party was in power in the state was a decade earlier, in 1990. The last chief minister of the party, Jagannath Mishra, for long a survivor in Bihar’s Machiavellian politics, exited the stage that year. In 1985, when the party won the state for the last time, it secured 39.3 per cent vote share. Those five years were tumultuous for Congress: there were six chief ministers from the party, with Mishra in the seat twice. After that, the party lost power for good. Its vote share steadily oozed away, never to return to even a quarter of the vote.

It is not clear, at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, as to who (or what) forms the core of its support base. Much water has passed through the Sone (and the Ganges) since then. In the OBC euphoria of the 1990s, the Yadav family commanded virtually the entire bloc of those votes. The carapace of that coalition began to crack from the year 2000. Now the family controls just the Yadav and Muslim votes. BJP, along with JD(U), forged a rainbow coalition of sorts after 2005, one that has lasted since then. Even with Kumar’s flip-flops in the last 10 years, this coalition has remained, by and large, intact. As for the Muslim vote, once the mainstay of the party across India, it has abandoned Congress in Bihar and moved to RJD. With AIMIM sniping at the heels, it is unlikely that RJD will allow any room for manoeuvre for Congress or anyone else.

Congress realises that it missed the OBC bus a long time ago. Hence, the noises about gaining a slice of that vote. This was evident in Gandhi’s campaign. But it is an uphill task to gain voters who had been assiduously ignored by the party right since Independence. Politics in any case is not a single-party game, there are other parties as well. Even friendly parties in one’s coalition won’t let one walk away with hard-won votes. Gandhi does not realise that. Nor does he understand the historic decline of his party in this key Indian state and what it will take to get back in the reckoning. In the absence of that understanding, what is left are dubious campaign slogans like “vote chori” and the Constitution being in danger. This kind of anarchism does not work in India’s keen political contests.