Bihar polls: Congress faces unrest, challenges over selection of candidates

If the grand mess over its yet unresolved seat-sharing negotiations with allies wasn’t bad enough, the Congress party is now busy staving off challenges triggered by its candidate selection for the two-phase Bihar Assembly polls.

The 60 candidates that the party has officially declared so far for the elections due on November 6 and November 11 have set off a wave of unrest within the Congress. The party has been rocked by allegations of rent-seeking by senior leaders involved in ticket distribution and of choosing nominees with no ideological affinity to the Congress over party loyalists with a strong grassroots base.

Congress vs RJD

In six seats that go to polls in the first phase, the party leadership has also been unable to get its candidate endorsed by its Grand Alliance partners. As such, in addition to their NDA rivals, in constituencies like Vaishali and Lalganj, the Congress candidates face a contest against RJD candidates, while in Bihar Sharif, Bachhwara and Raja Pakar, the party’s pick is pitted against rivals from the Grand Alliance’s CPI. In Beldaur, hours before the deadline for filing nominations for the first phase of polling ended, the RJD roped the Indian Inclusive Party (IIP) into the alliance and offered it the seat even though the Congress had already fielded a nominee here.

Also read: Is the Grand Alliance losing momentum ahead of Bihar election?

While desperate attempts by the Congress to convince allies to withdraw their candidates from these seats have failed so far, the RJD is now threatening to field a candidate even against Rajesh Ram, the Congress’s Dalit face in the state and the party’s state unit chief, in Kutumba.

More troubling is the fast-gaining perception that the Congress leadership has upended the entire social justice plank of Rahul Gandhi by relying heavily on candidates from forward castes while ignoring those from the backward classes whose cause the Lok Sabha’s Leader of Opposition espouses vociferously. Discounting the 11 reserved seats – 10 for scheduled castes and one for scheduled tribes – for which the Congress has named nominees, nearly 50 per cent of the party’s candidates named for general category seats so far belong to forward castes. For a party that claims to be fighting for the rights and representation of both religious minorities and women, the Congress has fielded only eight Muslims and five women candidates so far.

Allegation of tickets 'being sold'

On Saturday (October 18), the Congress’ incumbent Kasba MLA Afaque Alam told reporters that tickets were “being sold by Krishna Allavaru (the party’s Bihar in-charge), Pappu Yadav (Congress-aligned independent MP from Purnia) and the state Congress chief”.

Also read: Bihar polls: Modi to launch campaign with 2 rallies on Oct 24

What has also surprised many in the party is why it ceded its “sitting seat” of Jamalpur in Munger district to former Congress leader IP Gupta’s fledgling IIP. In the 2020 polls, the Congress’ Ajay Kumar Singh had wrested the constituency for the party for the first time since 1962. On October 16, Ajay was among the three sitting Congress MLA – other two being Afaque Alam and Khagaria MLA Chhatrapati Yadav – to be denied a party ticket.

While Singh had won the Jamalpur seat for the Congress after a gap of 58 years, the party had been losing Khagaria since 1990. Sources told The Federal that the party leadership replaced Chhatrapati Yadav with AICC secretary Chandan Yadav as its Khagaria candidate at the recommendation of former Chhattisgarh chief minister Bhupesh Baghel. Chandan had made his electoral debut in 2020 from the adjoining Beldaur seat but was defeated by the JD-U’s Panna Lal Patel by a narrow margin of 5,108 votes.

With the party favouring Chandan over him, Chhatrapati told The Federal that ticket distribution had been done “in complete violation of everything Rahul Gandhi had promised” and said “it is unfortunate that the only things that mattered in candidate selection were the influence of people recommending your candidature or money and muscle power; hard work and loyalty to the party have no value.”

Row over Kutumba seat

Multiple Bihar Congress leaders who lost out on tickets despite working in the constituencies for the last several years said that though they were assured by central leaders that tickets will be allotted “strictly on the basis of internal surveys, winnability and loyalty to the party”, what happened eventually was the exact opposite.

Also read: Bihar polls: Denied RJD ticket, man rolls on road; claims cash demand

“On at least two dozen seats, candidate selection has been done purely through on recommendation by different factional leaders or on the basis of money and muscle power… those who the party used extensively to propagate Rahul’s social justice plank have been left wondering what happened to the assurances the high command gave about tickets to backward castes,” a former party MLA and backward caste leader told The Federal.

Many in the Congress blame Rajya Sabha MP and former state unit chief Akhilesh Prasad Singh, a Bhumihar leader, for the skewed representation of OBC/EBC caste groups in the candidates list. Akhilesh is widely perceived as Lalu Yadav’s eyes and ears within the Congress party and many Bihar Congress leaders believe that the current turbulence in the Grand Alliance is also his creation.

“Akhilesh never wanted the Congress to get a respectable share of seats. It is through him that the RJD would get information on seats that the Congress had its eyes set on and so even before we began seat-sharing talks, the RJD had prepared its candidates on several seats we wanted to contest. In many such seats where the RJD did not have a candidate, it poached leaders from JD-U or other parties and when we started seat-sharing talks, Tejashwi said the seats had already been committed to its leaders,” a senior Bihar Congress leader said.

Sources claim that the ongoing tug of war between the Congress and RJD over the Kutumba seat is also the result of Akhilesh’s “treachery”. A senior RJD leader close to Lalu confirmed to The Federal that as a “pressure tactic to get the Congress to cede some seats” and also endorse Tejashwi as the alliance’s Chief Minister face, his party was indeed considering fielding a candidate against Ram, even though the candidate “may be asked to withdraw his nomination later if our demands are met.”

Poor representation for OBC/EBC candidates

Another senior Bihar Congress leader told The Federal that all through the seat-sharing talks with the RJD, Akhilesh had resisted Rahul’s plan of fielding a large chunk of backward caste candidates. This leader also alleged that Akhilesh would remind Ram that his Kutumba seat has a sizeable Bhumihar population, the community Akhilesh belongs to, and that Ram would lose Kutumba if Bhumihars felt he was responsible for the Congress picking backward caste candidates over Bhumihars and other forward castes.

Also read: Bihar’s fiscal fragility deepens as own-revenue continues to remain low

The poor representation for OBC/EBC candidates, say sources, has damaged the party’s victory prospects heavily, given that these communities wanted the Congress and Rahul to “walk the talk on increasing backward caste representation by giving them seats in proportion to their population”. As per the Bihar caste survey, the backward castes collectively form 63 per cent of the state’s electorate while Muslims account for 17.7 per cent. With just eight Muslim candidates and fewer than 25 OBC/EBC candidates, the Congress has visibly failed to uphold the pitch Rahul had assiduously built ever since he began campaigning for a nationwide caste census five years ago.

The “unequal” criteria adopted by the party for giving or denying tickets to those who had lost the 2020 polls has also created complications of its own. Congress veteran and Katihar MP Tariq Anwar has been on a warpath against his own party over denial of a ticket to former MLA Gajanand Shahi who lost the last election by a margin of just 113 votes from the Barbigha constituency in Sheikhpura district. In contrast, the party decided to once again bet on former Gaya deputy Mayor Akhoury Onkar Nath alias Mohan Shrivastava, who has been fielded yet again from the Gaya Town seat despite having lost elections from here thrice in the past.

Likewise, the party replaced Sudhir Kumar with Vinod Choudhary from the Sikandra seat in Jamui district even though Kumar lost the last election by just 5,505 votes. Choudhary had joined the Congress just earlier this year. Sikandra is one of the several seats where both Congress and RJD have fielded candidates.

Anupam's tweets against Gandhis

Choudhary, of course, isn’t the only recent entrant in the party to have secured a ticket. The party has shown similar benevolence towards Shashi Bhushan Rai, Shashant Shekhar and Anupam Kumar who have been fielded from Govindganj, Patna Sahib and Supaul, respectively, despite each of them having spent a year or less in the party. Of these, Anupam’s candidature, though not announced officially yet, has raised many eyebrows due to his foul attacks at Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi on his X account a decade ago.

Founder of Yuva Halla Bol, a youth campaign that raised issues of unemployment and examination paper leaks, Anupam had joined the Congress last September and attributed the move to being “influenced by Rahul Gandhi”. Soon after it became known that the party had allotted him the symbol to contest the polls from Supaul, Anupam’s posts on X from the period between 2011 and 2016, in which he repeatedly made derogatory remarks against Sonia, Rahul and Priyanka, went viral.

Interestingly, in his defence, Anupam did not express any regret for those remarks but claimed in a post on X that there was “a concerted campaign” against him and that people had “mined some of my anti-government tweets from 2012-13 and after that they started circulating fake & edited screenshots (sic)”.

While activists and even some journalists have come out in Anupam’s defence, claiming that his contentious posts on X were from over a decade ago and need not reflect what he thinks of the Gandhis today, a section of Congress leaders believe the party “should have looked at his history before fielding him”.

“We have often given tickets to people who may have said harsh things about the party or the Gandhis in the past when they were not in the Congress but in Anupam’s case it is not just about him having mocked Rahul but the kind of language he used and the things he said about Soniaji, Priyanka and even Dr. Manmohan Singh. Somebody showed me screenshots in which he says ‘our country was once sone ki chidiya (golden bird) but is now Sonia ki chidiya’ and in another one he calls Rahul a ‘national disaster’. I do not know if these are genuine or fake but the party should have asked him to clarify. Imagine how the BJP would use this in the election. Unfortunately, the entire ticket distribution seems to have been done in this terrible manner and it has left every genuine Congress worker unhappy and demoralised,” said a Congress office bearer.