Congress' Aggression In Bihar Tied To RJD's Struggles In Consolidating 'MY' Votes

The disputes between Bihar's main opposition party Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and its ally Congress have come out in the open after their alliance Mahagathbandhan (MGB) lost all four assembly seats in the November bypoll.

While RJD's support for West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee to lead the opposition's INDI Alliance and Congress' refusal to it became a bone of contention at the national level, there are certain disputes at the state level as well.

Recently, the promise of a Congress leader to appoint two Deputy Chief Ministers (CM) in Bihar, including a Muslim and an Upper Caste, if Tejashwi Yadav becomes the CM, has irked the RJD as it fears losing its Muslim voter base.

Congress' co-in-charge for Bihar, Shahnawaz Alam, said, "It is our resolve that if the next government is headed by Tejashwi Yadav, our party shall have two deputy CMs, one a Muslim and the other from upper castes."

Currently, Janata Dal (United) [JD(U)] chief Nitish Kumar is the Bihar CM while JD(U) ally Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has two deputy CMs, Samrat Choudhary and Vijay Kumar Sinha.

This arrangement works for the two parties as the BJP is the 'big brother' here with a higher number of seats than the JD(U), so it can have two Deputy CMs, but that is not the case with Congress, which is smaller than the RJD.

The RJD won 75 seats and the Congress 19 in the 2020 assembly election. Thus, the RJD would not want to have two Congress Deputy CMs. Moreover, the promise of a Muslim Deputy CM shows RJD in a poor light.

This is because RJD is known to enjoy the support of Muslims and Yadavs (MY) but is accused of not giving enough representation to the Muslims. It is also seen that when Muslims find an alternative, they vote for that and ditch the RJD.

That's why Asaduddin Owaisi's All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) won five seats in the 2020 Bihar assembly election, defeating MGB's Muslim candidates. A similar thing happened in the recent bypoll.

Prashant Kishor's Jan Suraj Party (JSP) played a spoilsport for the RJD in Belaganj, an RJD Bastion for over two decades, by fielding a Muslim candidate, who secured 17,000 votes while RJD lost by 21,000 votes.

Moreover, Prashant Kishor has already promised to field 40 Muslim candidates in the 2025 assembly election, daring RJD to do so. The Congress promise of a Muslim Deputy CM puts additional pressure on the RJD.

Hence, RJD spokesperson Mrityunjay Tiwary said, "Such statements violate the coalition dharma. The Congress must rein in such loose cannons," while the BJP accused the Congress of appeasement politics.

The Congress is also showing an aggressive stance for the seat-sharing arrangement. Alam also said that the "strike rate" in the Lok Sabha election should be considered when finalising the seat-sharing formula for Bihar assembly polls.

Notably, in the 2024 election, the Congress won three Lok Sabha seats after contesting nine of them, while the RJD could win only four after contesting 23 seats. This puts Congress at a strike rate of 33 per cent, while the RJD is at 17 per cent, almost half of Congress.

Other than Congress' own performance, the grand old party is deriving confidence for hard bargaining from RJD's poor performance in the recent bypoll where the latter could not even consolidate its traditional Yadav voters.

This was seen in Ramgarh, where the RJD came third behind the BJP and Mayawati's Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) as Yadavs appear to have voted for the BSP's Yadav candidate, instead of RJD's non-Yadav candidate.

The same thing happened in Purnia in the Lok Sabha election where Independent Pappu Yadav won over non-Yadav RJD candidate.

This shows that RJD does not enjoy a monopoly over Yadav votes like Uttar Pradesh's (UP) Samajwadi Party (SP), for which Yadavs vote despite not getting any representation other than on behalf of the Mainpuri family.

That is why, Congress is more submissive towards the SP than the RJD. The Congress follows SP for seat-sharing in UP but is set to negotiate harder with the RJD amid the Lalu Yadav party's failure to consolidate its 'MY' vote bank.