Bihar rout triggers turmoil in Congress amid growing calls for accountability

As protests continue to rock its Bihar unit even over a week after its humiliating rout in the assembly polls, the Congress seems determined to avoid any serious introspection of what went so horribly wrong with its campaign.

Instead of fixing accountability for the disastrous results that saw the Congress wind up at six seats against the 61 it contested as part of the RJD-led Grand Alliance, the party appears set on blaming the defeat almost entirely on an election apparatus compromised by the Election Commission in the victorious NDA’s favour; lest actions of those handpicked by party leader Rahul Gandhi are called into question.

Internal pressure builds up

Senior party leaders, not just from Bihar but at the AICC too, are shocked that even over a week after the rout, even the basic convention of relevant office- bearers offering to resign, taking accountability for the drubbing, has not been followed. Among the most vocal critics of the goings-on in the party since the result has been Congress veteran Tariq Anwar, Lok Sabha MP from Bihar’s Katihar.

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“In over four decades of my public life, I have never seen such a lack of seriousness for introspection after such a big and unexpected defeat. It has been almost 10 days since the results, but neither the Bihar in-charge (Krishna Allavaru) nor our PCC chief (Rajesh Ram) has taken accountability for the defeat. The bare minimum expected from them is that they would take responsibility and offer to resign. Forget taking responsibility; to date, neither the Bihar leadership nor the AICC has called for a meeting to assess reasons for the defeat,” Anwar told The Federal.

Senior party functionaries The Federal spoke to said there appeared to be a concerted effort by “a coterie of leaders” to project that while party leaders assigned by Rahul to handle the Bihar campaign had “done their best to ensure victory”, these efforts were eventually “undone by vote chori... manipulation of electoral rolls during the SIR (special intensive revision) because of the Election Commission’s collusion with the BJP”.

This indeed had also been the justification that the Congress’s central leadership, including Rahul and AICC communications chief Jairam Ramesh, had offered in the immediate aftermath of the dismal poll performance. In a post on X, Rahul had called the Bihar results “truly surprising” while asserting that “we could not achieve victory in an election that was not fair from the very beginning”. Singing a similar tune, Ramesh too claimed, “undoubtedly, the Bihar election results reflect large-scale vote theft orchestrated by the Prime Minister, the Home Minister and the Election Commission”.

Cracks widen within Congress

A large section of party leaders shares the assessment that a compromised electoral apparatus tipped the scales in the NDA’s favour even before the actual polls got underway. The overriding sentiment within the party, however, seems to be that Rahul’s vote chori narrative was being weaponised by the coterie surrounding him to demolish calls for applying necessary correctives within the organisation.

“No one is saying vote chori did not happen. The problem is that we have made vote chori an excuse to justify every electoral loss. The coterie of leaders that Rahul has surrounded himself with has convinced him that there is nothing wrong with us, but we are losing elections because our votes are being stolen. If the elections are rigged for a pre-determined result, let a CWC be called to discuss whether there is any point in legitimising a compromised election by participating in it; if we are not doing that, then we need to drop this excuse after every defeat,” a senior AICC office bearer told The Federal.

The AICC functionary added, “I fear this is being done to hide the failure of those who are being made in charge of different elections. In Bihar, even before polling, our state leaders were protesting against our in-charge (Krishna Allavaru), the PCC chief (Rajesh Ram), the CLP leader (Shakeel Ahmed Khan) and others like Akhilesh Prasad Singh and (independent Purnia MP) Pappu Yadav. There were clear signs that things were not how they should be. After the results, all these leaders have disappeared. Rajesh Ram and Shakeel Ahmed Khan could not even win their own elections (from Kutumba and Kadwa, respectively). Should all of these gentlemen not come and explain to the Congress president, if not to the Congress Working Committee, what went wrong?”

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Sources said soon after the results, several disgruntled Congress workers tried to meet Allavaru at the five-star hotel in Patna, where he had camped for much of the poll campaign. Allavaru, however, made himself scarce. In a hilarious corollary that can, perhaps, only be expected in a party like the Congress, sources said several of these disgruntled leaders ordered copious amounts of food at the hotel and told the staff to bill it to Allavaru’s room!

Fault lines in Grand Alliance

On Saturday, several party leaders led a raucous protest at the Bihar Congress’s Sadaqat Ashram headquarters in Patna, demanding action against Allavaru, Rajesh Ram, Akhilesh Prasad Singh, Shakeel Ahmed Khan and Pappu Yadav. Ironically, the only one who turned up to speak to the protestors was Yadav, who is not even a party office-bearer.

Sources in the party say there is even a bid to blame RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav, the Grand Alliance’s chief ministerial candidate, for “a slew of mistakes” that cost the entire Opposition bloc dear. Earlier this week, senior party MLA from Jharkhand, Irfan Ansari, who was among the poll observers the Congress appointed for Muslim-dominated constituencies of Bihar’s Seemanchal region, claimed that the alliance had performed poorly in these seats because “minority votes could not be consolidated in our favour due to (Hyderabad MP Asaduddin Owaisi’s) AIMIM being kept out of the Grand Alliance”.

“Owaisi wanted to join the Grand Alliance, but Tejashwi rejected his request... There was no consultation with the Congress about rejecting Owaisi’s request; it is for the RJD to explain why it took that call unilaterally, because it damaged the entire alliance,” Ansari told reporters.

Congress sources, however, claim Ansari’s assessment is only partly correct to the extent that the AIMIM did damage the Grand Alliance’s prospects on several constituencies with a sizeable Muslim population, but add that blaming Tejashwi entirely is “hardly appropriate considering that no one in the Bihar Congress or at the AICC would have agreed to an alliance with Owaisi”.

Pressure mounts on leadership

“These are all excuses. Many things went wrong with the alliance, and it is a fact that the Congress did suffer because of its alliance with the RJD for several reasons, such as the baggage of the ‘jungle raj’ narrative and delay in finalising seat-sharing, but allying with AIMIM was never an option because everyone knows how the BJP would have used that against us. The challenges we faced because of the alliance with RJD are many, but in this election, what other option did we have...did we have the capability to go solo?” asked a former MP from Bihar.

A party leader involved with the ‘election war room’ set up for Bihar told The Federal that even before votes were cast for the first phase of polling on November 6, “we were aware that our prospects are flagging”. The leader said, “Names of important candidates who were on a sticky wicket, along with suggestions of what needed to be done, were shared with the candidates and the observers for those constituencies and the state in-charge but nothing was done... most leaders who were appointed as observers for various constituencies stepped out of their hotels only when Rahul, Priyanka (Gandhi) or the CP (Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge) came for rallies”.

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As reported on November 16 by The Federal, a growing section of party leaders is now calling for accountability to be fixed not just for the Bihar loss but the string of defeats that the Congress has suffered in Haryana, Maharashtra, Jammu & Kashmir and Delhi following the marginal uptick in its fortunes during last year’s Lok Sabha polls. Yet, there is also growing despondency and frustration within the ranks, as action is being sought against what they call ‘repeat offenders’, including Rahul Gandhi’s confidante KC Venugopal and party treasurer Ajay Maken, who is frequently appointed as senior observer or head of screening panels in poll-bound states, yet who seem to become “more entrenched in the party after every new failure”.

Many in the party believe that the leadership is avoiding any genuine introspection of the defeat because doing so would also “point fingers at the conduct of Rahul Gandhi”, which the Congress high command wants to avoid “at all costs”. The central leadership’s decision, taken days after the Bihar rout, to organise a “maha rally” at Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan on December 14 against the SIR underway in 12 states and Union Territories is being viewed as a bid to “escape any difficult questions the high command may face over the Bihar result”, sources said.