Grand Alliance battles chaos and crumbling unity ahead of Bihar polls

Chaos, confusion, defiance and a near rebellion – with the deadline for filing nominations for the first phase of Bihar polls upon it, the Opposition’s Grand Alliance is racing against time to set its house in order. Through Thursday (October 16), conflicting electoral interests and fragile egos of its constituents continued to stall the alliance’s hope of announcing its seat-sharing deal even as the ruling NDA coalition succeeded in setting aside its squabbles and announced its candidates for all 243 assembly seats of Bihar.

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Late Thursday night, the Congress finally managed to push out its first list of 48 candidates, but its leaders continued to evade queries about how many seats the party would ultimately contest and whether a consensus had been reached with Lalu Yadav’s RJD, the Left parties and Mukesh Sahani’s VIP on a seat-sharing deal.

Friendly contest ‘imminent’

Sources in the Congress and the RJD confirmed to The Federal that both parties continued to stake claim for “two to four seats” and that the possibility of both parties fielding candidates on these seats for a ‘friendly contest’ looked “very imminent”.

The stalemate, sources said, continued despite Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and Lok Sabha’s Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi finally stepping in themselves for negotiations with Lalu and his son Tejashwi, bypassing intermediaries like Congress’s Bihar in-charge Krishna Allavaru and state unit chief Rajesh Ram.

The prolonged deadlock in the seat-sharing talks between the two major Grand Alliance constituents was because of Allavaru’s “unyielding and brusque” negotiating style, which had irked Lalu and Tejashwi even earlier on in the seat-sharing talks, say sources close to the RJD leadership. RJD sources said Allavaru, along with Ram and Congress Legislative Party chief Shakeel Ahmed Khan, had also met Lalu and Tejashwi for several hours on Wednesday night after they returned to Patna from Delhi.

“No headway was made because Allavaru remained adamant about the Congress contesting seats like Kahalgaon and Jale, which the RJD also wants to contest,” said an RJD leader privy to the negotiations, adding that at the end of Wednesday’s late night meeting, both Lalu and Tejashwi made it clear to the Congress’ interlocutors that any further discussions on these seats “will happen only with Kharge and Rahul”.

No end to the stalemate

On Thursday, however, despite the Congress high command’s intervention, the stalemate continued with Lalu reportedly telling Rahul, “There is no time left for negotiations” and that if both parties wish to contest from Kahalgaon and Jale, they should both let their candidates file nominations and “leave it to the people to decide”. On the remaining seats for which a consensus had been reached, the RJD chief is learnt to have told both Kharge and Rahul that both parties must move on with the nomination process by declaring their lists instead of wasting time on making official announcements regarding seat-sharing.

Sources said the RJD had finally conceded “about 60 seats” to the Congress while keeping the open option for a “friendly fight on another four to five seats”. “Since deadline (for filing nominations) is tomorrow, the leadership may have felt that for seats on which there was still no consensus, both parties can give their candidates and if consensus emerges before the last date for withdrawing nominations, then party that gives up its claim can withdraw it candidate and if not then we go for friendly fight,” a senior alliance leader said.

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Though conceding that the intervention by Kharge and Rahul should have “come much earlier”, sources in the Congress’ Bihar unit said, “The alliance was now largely on track barring some seats” and that “everything will be clear by Friday (October 17) afternoon” before the deadline for filing nominations for the first phase of polling, due on November 6, concludes.

Suspense continues over VIP

While the conflict between the Congress and the RJD is now “almost resolved”, suspense continues on the fate of Mukesh Sahani and his Vikassheel Insaan Party (VIP). Sources said that apart from calling Lalu, Rahul also reached out to Sahani on Thursday, urging him not to break away from the alliance “after all the hard work” he had put in over the past three years. Besides Rahul, alliance leader Dipankar Bhattacharya of the CPI-MLL, whose party has named 18 candidates and is expected to field at least two more, is also learnt to have reached out to pacify Sahani.

Sources said it was the intervention of Bhattacharya and Rahul that finally stopped Sahani from addressing a press conference he had convened and twice rescheduled on Thursday. It was widely anticipated that the press conference had been convened by Sahani to announce his exit from the Grand Alliance.

Yet, though the VIP chief may have held back his rebellion on Thursday, sources in the Grand Alliance said the possibility of him walking out even at this late stage “cannot be ruled out”. The Federal had reported earlier this week that the Grand Alliance, in particular the RJD, had already been working on a contingency plan to offset any electoral damage that the exit of Sahani, a leader from the extremely backward Mallah caste, could cause. It is, in part, due to these “pre-emptive and precautionary steps” that the RJD, say sources, left it to Rahul and Bhattacharya to intercede with Sahani instead of Tejashwi stepping in to do so.

On the contrary, the RJD is learnt to have conveyed to Rahul that retaining Sahani in the alliance was “also the Congress’s responsibility”, hinting that any additional concessions to be made to the VIP in terms of seats must now come from the Congress’s quota of seats. The RJD, on its part, is willing to concede “no more than 14 seats” to Sahani, who had started his negotiations with a demand for 60 seats only to scale down to 24 seats but with the assertion that he would “not accept anything less” along with a public announcement from Tejashwi of making him the deputy CM if the Grand Alliance forms the government.

Grand Alliance loses plot

The chaos and indecision within the alliance have, expectedly, left many of its leaders frustrated. “We had everything going for us in this election. Rahul’s Voter Adhikar Yatra, Tejashwi’s rising popularity, fights within the NDA and the visible anti-incumbency of 20 years... the momentum was with us but now we have made a mess of everything, what message are we sending to the voters,” said Congress’ Katihar MP Tariq Anwar, adding that he had been “urging our alliance leaders for months to sort out seat-sharing and candidate selection at the earliest so that we can cash in on the momentum”.

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A candidate from the CPI-MLL blamed the RJD and Congress for “neutralising all the gains” that the alliance had made over the past several months. “Till two weeks back, we were leading in the perception battle; there was anger against SIR and vote chori, our campaigns were working on the ground, we were united... now we have given the BJP and its media a chance to mock us; everyone is asking how will an alliance that can’t even decide its seat-sharing run a state like Bihar,” the CPI-MLL leader said.

What has also left many in the Left and even in Congress baffled is the latter’s list of candidates. “Just look at this list of candidates (released by the Congress); does it look like the list of a party that has been campaigning for the last five years on the plank of social justice and empowerment of Dalits, backward castes and extremely backward castes. Out of the 48 candidates, if you leave out the (Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes) reserved seats, almost 50 percent of the candidates are from forward castes like Bhumihars, Thakurs and Brahmins. Even the RJD seems to have fallen into the same upper-class trap; its list is not out, but it also seems to be running after Bhumihars and Thakurs. With what face will they talk about social justice after fielding such candidates?” said a Left leader.