Tunnel vision: On the Bihar election result and the Congress’s stance

The disastrous performance of the Mahagatbandhan, led by the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), in the Bihar Assembly elections, has been followed by claims attributing this to a purported collusion between the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Election Commission of India (ECI). The RJD won 25 seats, the Congress six, the CPI (Marxist-Leninist) (Liberation) two, and the CPI (Marxist) just one. Allegations of vote theft revolve around pre-existing concerns about the ECI’s perceived bias towards the BJP, and around the more contestable claim of manipulating electoral rolls during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR). The exercise raised concerns that it was moving the responsibility of proving one’s eligibility to vote to the people instead of strengthening the state and the ECI to continue upholding it. Concerns of this nature are relevant, including for the ongoing second phase of SIR. But prevailing explanations of the National Democratic Alliance’s win are also not incredible, converging on high women’s turnout, focused welfare and cash transfers, a recalibrated coalition of OBC and EBC groups, and organisational capacity. In fact, the ECI’s decision to not restrain the Nitish Kumar government from transferring cash to beneficiaries of a State women’s scheme, by accepting it as “ongoing”, contradicts a bar the ECI set during the 2023 Rajasthan Assembly polls for Ashok Gehlot’s Congress government. Thus, the allegations against the ECI are partly due to its concerning conduct.

However, there is no verifiable evidence that the pattern of deletions by SIR across booths aligns with the voting preferences of one coalition’s supporters. There is also no method to match each deleted entry with a credible, pre-existing record of partisan preference. In the constituencies that the Mahagatbandhan covered in its ‘Voter Adhikar Yatra’, which framed deletions as part of a concerted attempt to dispossess specific groups of their franchise, it performed as poorly as in the rest of Bihar. This failure may be because the Mahagatbandhan neither consolidated public sentiment following the Yatra nor linked livelihood issues with the SIR’s inclusivity. It also lacked credible answers to the NDA campaign that electing Tejashwi Yadav as Chief Minister would lead to ‘jungle raj’, a reference to the RJD’s previous terms. The election was also fought on the question of who should be Chief Minister — Mr. Kumar or Mr. Yadav — and the polarisation on this question evidently favoured the former. Opposition parties, particularly the Congress, should assess their failures in Bihar in a way that does not undermine an already fragile public confidence in the ECI. Blaming the ECI to avoid introspection can be self-defeating for the Congress, to the extent that more of that is possible.