As euphoria over Voter Adhikar Yatra wears off, INDIA Bloc bickers over seats in Bihar

Weeks after Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s 1300-km Voter Adhikar Yatra across Bihar projected an image of bonhomie and camaraderie among leaders of the Grand Alliance, the seat-sharing talks underway now within the Opposition coalition are bringing out conflicts and discontent.

Bickering over seats

Grand Alliance leaders assert that “some bickering (among alliance members) is normal” during seat-sharing negotiations and maintain that this would have no adverse impact on the stability of the bloc. The Federal has, however, learnt that allocation of just over a dozen constituencies of the state among the allies has emerged as a point of contention during the ongoing seat-sharing talks.

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With more than one party laying claim to these seats, sources said a consensus on the final seat-sharing blueprint and allocation of specific constituencies to individual members of the alliance – the RJD, the Congress, Left parties and the Vikassheel Insaan Party (VIP) – could drag on till the end of this month, when the Election Commission (EC) is also expected to announce the poll schedule for Bihar.

Quarrel in NDA only solace

A point of solace for the Opposition’s alliance, though, is that seat-sharing negotiation within the ruling NDA coalition is reportedly facing even greater hiccups. In the NDA, sources say the JD(U) is insistent on retaining its ‘senior ally’ tag in the alliance and contesting more seats than the BJP while smaller allies such as the Lok Janshakti Party- Ram Vilas, Hindustan Awam Morcha and Rashtriya Lok Morcha of Union ministers Chirag Paswan, Jitan Ram Manjhi and Upendra Kushwaha, respectively, too are pressing on with their demand for a larger pie of seats; a large chunk of them from the JD(U) quota.

In the NDA, the JD(U) is insistent on retaining its ‘senior ally’ tag in the alliance and contesting more seats than the BJP, while smaller allies such as LJP-Ram Vilas, HAM, and RLM want a larger pie of seats, a large chunk of them from the JD(U) quota.

The senior leaders of the Grand Alliance were initially keen on finalising the seat-allocation blueprint by mid-September so that their parties could ride on the palpable electoral momentum spurred in the coalition’s favour by Rahul’s yatra and get the first-mover advantage over their NDA rivals in the Bihar campaign. This, sources in the Opposition alliance conceded to The Federal, looks highly unlikely now.

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Clash over ‘sitting seats’

To minimise friction among constituents during the seat-sharing talks, Grand Alliance leaders had initially agreed that seats each party held currently in the Bihar Assembly would remain with those parties and that negotiations would be confined to the remaining 129 of the state’s 243 constituencies that are presently with the ruling NDA coalition. However, cracks seem to have emerged even with this formula as the RJD wants the Congress to give up the Raja Pakar seat in Vaishali district, which the latter had won in 2020, and new Grand Alliance entrant VIP of Mukesh Sahni demanding the Congress’s ‘sitting seat’ of Maharajganj in Siwan district.

The demands of the RJD and VIP have caught the Congress by surprise as the party was particularly buoyant about its victory prospects in the impending election, given the massive public response Rahul’s yatra received. Congress sources said the party was, in fact, hoping that not only would it get to retain all 19 seats it had won in the 2020 polls but also that its senior ally, the RJD, would also not demand a scaling down in the total seats that the Congress was allotted in the last election – 70 seats – despite a poor strike rate.

Factors steering lobbying for seats

Grand Alliance leaders told The Federal that the intense lobbying for seats by each constituent is being fuelled by three basic factors – firstly, the Congress’s self-assessment of being on a much surer electoral footing this election due to Rahul’s yatra, secondly, the RJD’s firm belief that its leader Tejashwi Yadav would be the state’s preeminent vote magnet in the impending polls and lastly the induction of new ally, VIP, and ongoing efforts to also rope in Chirag Paswan’s estranged uncle and former Union minister Pashupati Paras and INDIA Bloc constituent JMM of Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren.

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Besides Raja Pakar and Maharajganj, other constituencies on which more than one alliance member is laying claim to include Arrah in Bhojpur district and Vaishali in Vaishali district, among others. In Bhagalpur district, the allies are confronted with a more perplexing puzzle.

Bhagalpur puzzle

In the 2020 Bihar polls, the RJD had allotted Bhagalpur district’s Kahalgaon, Sultanganj, and Bhagalpur (town) seats to Congress and kept the district’s four remaining constituencies – Bihpur, Gopalpur, Pirpainti, and Nathnagar – with itself. While Congress’s Ajeet Sharma won the Bhagalpur seat, his party lost its former bastion of Kahalgaon, the stronghold of late party veteran Sadanand Singh, as well as Sultanganj. The RJD too had a poor showing in the district, winning just one (Nathnagar) of the four seats it contested.

This election, Congress sources say the party wants to retain Kahalgaon in its kitty but give up Sultanganj to the RJD even though in the last election it had lost Kahalgaon by over 42000 votes; a much larger margin of defeat compared to the more modest 11,000 vote margin with which it had lost Sultanganj.

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Conflict over caste in Vaishali

The tussle in the Vaishali Assembly constituency, say sources, is because a prominent Congress leader from Karnataka is backing the party’s Engineer Sanjeev, a young Bhumihar (upper caste) leader, for a ticket from the seat while the RJD wants to field its backward caste leader Ajay Kushwaha from here. In the last election, Sanjeev had lost the Vaishali seat to the JD(U)’s Siddharth Patel (a Kushwaha by caste) by a slender margin of just over 7,400 votes. The Congress claims that Kushwahas and Bhumihars collectively make up a bulk of Vaishali’s electorate, and so fielding a Kushwaha, when the JD(U) is also expected to field a candidate from the same community, may not be a sound electoral strategy.

In Bhojpur district, allies Congress and CPI-MLL are unwilling to give up their respective claims on the Arrah Assembly segment, which has a sizeable presence of the Rajput community. The CPI-MLL had lost the Arrah assembly seat to the BJP by a narrow margin of 3,000 votes in the last election, but the party believes that its prospects here have brightened ever since its 2020 winner from the adjoining Tarari constituency, Sudama Prasad, was elected to the Lok Sabha as the MP from Arrah last year after defeating former Union minister RK Singh, a Rajput.

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Congress’s demand for winnable seats

The Congress, sources told The Federal, has been imploring the RJD that it should get seats where it has a shot a victory instead of constituencies that no other ally wants to contest. The insinuation within the demand is that the Congress’ poor strike rate of winning just 19 of the 70 seats it was allocated last time was, in part, because it was allotted the ‘wrong constituencies’ even though the number of seats it contested as an alliance partner may have been respectable.

Congress’s Bihar in-charge Krishna Allavaru too stressed on this during a press conference in Delhi on Wednesday (September 10) when he underscored the distinction between “winnable and non-winnable seats” and said any ally “should not get only seats that cannot be won; one should also get winning seats”.

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In a barely veiled message to the RJD, the alliance’s senior partner in Bihar, Allavaru said, “all parties will have to give up some seats” for a fair seat-sharing formula to be accomplished, and that “if new political parties come into the alliance, every partner has to contribute from its share.”