Congress lacked poll message, strong local leaders

NEW DELHI: Congress got its political strategy in Bihar so hopelessly wrong that it managed to win just five seats, down from nine in the previous election, when it contested in alliance with RJD.

This came about despite a mounting expensive campaign involving high-voltage advertising and star campaigners such as party chief Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul Gandhi.

That even the party’s state unit chief Mehboob Ali Kaiser lost by more than 18,000 votes shows the poverty of political capital the grand old party of India suffers in Bihar, the land of the Arthshastra and Jayaprakash Narayan’s total revolution.

Going it alone in the state, this time, like the 2009 Lok Sabha polls, Congress fielded candidates in all 243 seats. The mistakes it made in candidate selection and in tactics adopted in the run up to the elections, point to the broader errors in strategy the party made. “We took a deliberate decision not to work in alliance with other parties. Results obviously indicate that our party has to start from scratch to rebuild itself and that is what we plan to do,” Sonia Gandhi said after the results were declared.

Congress’ critical error seems to have been that it lacked a central poll message. That it lacked strong local leaders who could act as messengers didn’t help either. The party’s usual plank of development was robbed of all its sheen by Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, who had claimed that agenda for himself and was delivering results on the ground.

Congress had hoped to win about 40 seats. It wrongly read, as it now turns out, that BJP was on the decline and it could claim the upper caste vote. The party also believed that it could win the Muslim vote from Lalu Prasad.

Nitish Kumar’s refusal to allow Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi to campaign in Bihar seems to have paid him rich political dividends: About 17% of the state’s population is Muslim and Kumar’s JD(U) seems to have won more Muslim votes than ever before.

Above all else, Congress counted on the star power of Rahul Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi, who, between them, campaigned in 21 constituencies. Of this, Congress won only two. Of the nine seats the party had won in 2005 elections, it managed to retain only the Bahadurganj. The Kahalgaon, Kishanganj and Kasba seats were won by a narrow margin too, with the victory margin in Kishanganj as low as 264.

Congress heir-apparent Rahul Gandhi campaigned extensively in 17 constituencies over all phases. Of these, Congress managed to win only Kahalgaon in Bhagalpur district. In the remaining constituencies, Congress candidates did not even come a close second. The Congress president’s record is no better as the party won only Kishanganj out of Buxar, Bhabua and Motihari constituencies where she had campaigned.

The party finished second in only 18 seats where its candidates lost miserably with margins as high as 52,444 (MLA Sunita Devi in Korha constituency). Of the nine seats Congress held, it has been routed in at least in four with its candidates finishing fourth in some constituencies and polling just 3,000 votes.