The Congress high command is livid with its Bihar leadership for wrong selection of candidates and yielding too much political space to ally Rashtriya Janata Dal and has intervened with full force to salvage the situation at this late stage.
Sources revealed that a coterie of state leaders played mischief not only in selection of candidates but also mysteriously agreed to change some seats despite final agreement, giving up the Congress’s claim on favourable constituencies. The in-charge of Bihar, Shaktisinh Gohil, is said to have strongly registered his protest.
A senior leader told The Telegraph: “We started very well and extracted a good bargain from the RJD with 70 seats. But we faltered all of a sudden as vested interests of a few state leaders came into play. It showed the leadership has learnt no lessons from past mistakes and showed undue reliance on state leaders who have survived through politics of networking and accommodation. The central intervention came at a very late stage when the damage had been done.”
While some central leaders have started pacifying the strong contenders who were denied tickets, the role of three Bihar leaders — state unit chief Madan Mohan Jha, legislature party leader Sadanand Singh and Rajya Sabha MP Akhilesh Prasad Singh — has been significantly curtailed. Gohil, along with general secretary in-charge of organisation, K.C. Venugopal, and Rahul Gandhi’s aide K. Raju will now play a decisive role in both selection of constituencies and candidates for the later phases.
The mood in the party is reflected in the constitution of the election management and coordination committee headed by Randeep Surjewala, an exceptional intervention at a stage when nominations for the first phase have already been done. This committee interestingly does not include either of the three — Jha, Sadanand and Akhilesh.
Other senior leaders from Bihar, who were said to be upset over the mismanagement and malpractices, like Meira Kumar, Nikhil Kumar, Anil Sharma, Tariq Anwar, Shakeel Ahmed, Shatrughan Sinha and Chandan Bagchi, have been included in this key committee.
What may have significant bearing on the electoral outcome is the differences within the party on the projection of Tejashwi Yadav as the chief ministerial candidate. Some leaders felt the leadership issue should have been kept vague even as Tejashwi was the natural choice to lead the government as that would have helped the Congress in attracting a larger chunk of forward caste votes. The RJD’s theme song — Is baar Tejashwi tay hai — has also dismayed these leaders who would have preferred much sharper focus on issues and failures of the BJP and chief minister Nitish Kumar, not leadership.
These leaders believe a personality clash between Nitish and Tejashwi should have been avoided as the situational logic was anyway hostile towards the ruling alliance and the wiser strategy was to exploit the public resentment. Though work has already started on a common minimum programme, these leaders prefer keeping a safe distance from the RJD and won’t be happy with a joint rally by Rahul and Tejashwi. They even claim that the alliance between the two parties was saved by Priyanka Gandhi’s intervention after preparations were made to go alone.
