The Congress appears to have once again pursued a self-defeatist attitude, this time while selecting candidates for the Bihar elections, triggering anger and dismay among party workers who lamented that a golden opportunity to send the BJP-JDU packing had been frittered away.

Congress leaders said nepotism, networking, money and foolishness had dominated the process of ticket distribution, at time chief minister Nitish Kumar is said to be facing intense anti-incumbency and there seems to be tension in the ruling alliance.

Although the Congress’s first list of 21 had caused much resentment and prompted the central leadership to try to take corrective steps, the final line-up of 70 candidates after the names of 59 were released on Thursday night only deepened the frustration.

Many leaders concurred with the assessment that the party would be able to put up a fight in about 40 constituencies only as the remaining 30 candidates were so weak that their selection had amounted to giving a walkover to the opponents.

Rahul Gandhi had publicly declared as Congress president that candidates would not be dropped from parachutes and that local party workers toiling at the grassroots would be given preference. The ticket distribution, however, indicates that there is an invisible lobby within the Congress that is hell bent on proving that Rahul’s lofty pronouncements mean little in realpolitik.

One leader explained: “One Mithilesh Chaudhary has been given the ticket from Benipur. Nobody knew who he was, neither in the constituency, nor in the party. Frantic queries revealed that he is the brother-in-law of Kirti Azad, a former BJP leader who (unsuccessfully) contested the Lok Sabha elections on a Congress ticket from Dhanbad last year. Gunjan Patel, who had been working in Patna, has been fielded from Nalanda. Praveen Kushwaha, an accused in a kidnapping-and-murder case, wanted a ticket from Bhagalpur but was sent to Patna Sahib.”

The leader added: “Dropping by parachute is the overriding principle, no matter what Rahul Gandhi says. At Chanpatia, Congress worker Sadhna Mishra worked hard for five years, but the candidate is Abhishek Ranjan. We don’t know who he is. There are many faces we had never seen in the party. We are sure they won’t be able to locate the party headquarters, Sadaqat Ashram in Patna. And if you work in area A, you are fielded from area X.”

Another leader sarcastically said: “Sachin Tendulkar — chess; Vishwanathan Anand — football; P.T. Usha — cricket…. That’s how Congress managers will deploy their resources. And the parachute culture is so rampant that Luv Sinha, whose face won’t be recognised by even 1 per cent of the voters, has been fielded from Bankipur because he is Shatrughan Sinha’s son…. Sharad Yadav’s daughter has been fielded from Madhepura’s Bihariganj where she never lived or worked.”

What is worse, the dominant feeling among the workers is that the criteria fixed by the central leadership for candidate selection was willfully violated and tickets were distributed considering extraneous factors.

“One candidate’s selection happened only because he was collecting gifts and money for an AICC secretary. Another, a known criminal out on bail, bought a ticket. Some were preferred over strong local contenders because they were from important families. These tendencies have only intensified despite the shocking decline in the party’s fortunes,” the leader said.

A leader of alliance partner RJD said they had asked the Congress to pick “winnable candidates” but the party kept insisting on numbers. “They took 70 seats although we knew they did not have good candidates. It is proven now,” the leader said.

Congress workers are so angry that they want Rahul to drop the “moral posturing” of promoting hardworking party loyalists.