Bihar polls: Congress dispatches Gehlot to meet Lalu, Tejashwi as Grand Alliance teeters

Desperate efforts are being made by the top leadership of Bihar’s Grand Alliance to ensure that their ugly squabbles on seat negotiations through the past two weeks do not entirely raze the gains they had made over the past two months with a blistering campaign against the state’s ruling NDA regime.

Wednesday (October 22) is expected to witness veteran Congress leader Ashok Gehlot meet the RJD’s Lalu Yadav and Tejashwi Yadav, along with leaders of the Left parties in Patna in a last minute scramble to resolve the stalemate over their seat-sharing deal and pave the way for a joint press conference by the alliance’s leadership the following day for a “show of unity”.

Grand Alliance candidates pitted against each other

As of Wednesday morning, there were at least 14 seats across the state where candidates of the Grand Alliance were pitted against each other. Six of these constituencies – Bachhwara, Beldaur, Bihar Sharif, Vaishali, Raja Pakar and Gaura Bauram – go to polls in the first phase of voting, due on November 6, for which the last date of withdrawing nominations is already past.

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Of these, while the Congress and RJD have both fielded candidates in Vaishali, the Raja Pakar, Bachhwara and Bihar Sharif seats have candidates from the Congress and the CPI up against each other. Likewise, in Beldaur, both Congress and the alliance’s most recent entrant, IP Gupta’s Indian Inclusive Party (IIP), have fielded a candidate each while in Gaura Bauram the RJD’s Afzal Ali was unable to withdraw his nomination despite his party offering the seat to Santosh Sahani, brother of VIP chief Mukesh Sahani, hours before the deadline for filing nominations lapsed on October 17.

In each of these six constituencies, the only option that the alliance leaders now have is to convince one of their candidates to “endorse” the other and ‘drop out’ of the race. The RJD has already made the first move by declaring that the VIP’s Santosh Sahani and not its own Afzal Ali is the alliance’s candidate from the Gaura Bauram seat.

For the remaining eight constituencies of Kahalgaon, Sikandra, Sultanganj, Narkatiaganj, Chainpur, Babubarhi, Kargahar and Warsaliganj, which go to polls in the second phase of voting due on November 11, the last date for withdrawing nominations is October 23. This leaves the Grand Alliance with less than 24 hours to resolve their differences on these seats and withdraw the candidate of the party that agrees to cede its claim.

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Of these eight seats, the Congress and the RJD are locked in a turf war in Kahalgaon, Sikandra, Warsaliganj, Sultanganj and Narkatiaganj while the RJD and VIP have both declared candidates for the Babubarhi and Chainpur seats and the Congress and the CPI have fielded their nominees in the Kargahar constituency.

Kharge, Rahul reach out to Lalu

Sources told The Federal that efforts to stabilise the imploding alliance had begun on Monday with Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and Lok Sabha’s Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi reaching out to RJD chief Lalu Yadav with a request to return to the negotiating table. As a gesture of good faith, hours before the deadline for withdrawing nominations lapsed, the Congress withdrew its candidate Aditya Kumar from the Lalganj constituency where the RJD has fielded Shivani Shukla, daughter of jailed RJD leader and murder convict Vijay Kumar Shukla alias Munna Shukla.

Earlier, on October 16, Rahul, along with ally CPI-MLL’s Dipankar Bhattacharya, had also interceded with Mukesh Sahani when the VIP chief was on the brink of quitting the Grand Alliance. As reported earlier by The Federal, it was Rahul and Dipankar’s intervention that finally prevented the VIP’s hasty exit from the Opposition bloc even though Sahani did not get the number of seats he was bargaining for with his alliance partners.

Also read: Bihar polls: RJD announces 143 candidates; Tejashwi from Raghopur

On Tuesday (October 21), the truce talks continued with Rahul’s close aide and AICC general secretary KC Venugopal reaching out to Lalu and informing him that the Congress was flying down Gehlot to Patna to find an amicable solution to the deadlock over seat-sharing with the allies. Though Gehlot is expected to be accompanied by Bihar Congress in-charge Krishna Allavaru, sources said it will be the former Rajasthan Chief Minister who will lead the discussions with Lalu and Tejashwi as the father-son duo have made it clear to the Congress high command that they “do not wish to negotiate any further with Allavaru”. Sources in both Congress and RJD claimed that it was Allavaru’s “unyielding, tactless and often arrogant” negotiations that derailed the seat-sharing talks with other allies.

Sources informed The Federal that the belated huddle to set the Grand Alliance’s house in order came only after the Congress high command as well as the RJD leadership was “flooded with complaints” from their respective leaders in the state as well as the civil society groups who had been aiding the Opposition’s election campaign.

“The feedback was what everyone has already been sensing over the past two weeks – that we have messed everything up. A senior RJD MP even called up Tejashwi and told him bluntly that he was disgusted at how all parties in the alliance seemed determined to throw away an election they were confident of winning till just two weeks ago. The senior leadership of the Congress and Left parties was also flooded with similar complaints from what I gather because everyone could feel that the momentum we had created with the Voter Adhikar Yatra and Tejashwi’s campaign had been ruined by this ugly bickering over seats while the NDA, which had its own share of differences during seat-sharing talks, had put all that aside and started its campaign full steam; even Nitish Kumar came out to campaign today (October 21),” a senior Grand Alliance leader told The Federal.

Anger over Rahul's absence

Sources in the Bihar Congress said anger had also been building up among party leaders and cadre alike against Rahul’s absence from the state. Many party leaders, it is learnt, were “openly blaming Rahul” for not stepping in to resolve the seat-sharing stalemate with alliance partners even though it was his Voter Adhikar Yatra that had “really given a boost to the alliance’s victory prospects”.

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“Yet again, he (Rahul) has done what he is notorious for; disappear when he is needed the most. Instead of ensuring that the seat-sharing talks go off smoothly, he went away on another foreign trip (to South America) and when he returned, he seemed more interested in going from Delhi to Chandigarh to UP and even Assam on a ‘condolence yatra’ to pay homage to different people... is this his commitment to Bihar,” asked a senior Bihar Congress leader.

Referring to the video released on Rahul’s social media platforms on Diwali showing him trying his hands at making different sweets at Delhi’s iconic Ghantewala sweets shop, the leader said, “when everything is falling apart, our leader is busy frying imartis in Delhi.”

Another alliance leader said that the common feedback from workers of all mahagathbandhan constituents, activists and political commentators was that the “only way for us to salvage the campaign now was to return to the talks table, withdraw overlapping candidates in as many seats as possible and have our top leaders jointly and candidly address the press to set to rest all talk of disunity so that we can then proceed to chalk out the next steps of the campaign.”

Sources said if all goes well in the talks between Gehlot and the RJD leadership, the Congress may finally come around to the idea of formally announcing Tejashwi as the Chief Minister face of the alliance – a key RJD demand that the Congress has been unwilling to concede thus far – when the leaders of the Opposition bloc meet the press on October 23.

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“Everything depends on what happens in the meeting between Gehlot, Lalu and Tejashwi. It is a good thing that the Congress high command has finally realised the need to send a seasoned politician to sort out this mess instead of relying on Allavaru who thinks elections are won by data and surveys. Let’s hope things get sorted out; we have already lost crucial time and it will not be easy to reverse the public’s impression about infighting in our alliance even before the election... the BJP and JD-U are already mocking us in election rallies,” a CPI-MLL candidate told The Federal.