There are electoral defeats, and then there are engineered defeats of the quiet, covert kind where the architect walks away whistling. Bihar’s Mahagathbandhan didn’t collapse because of Modi, the ECI, or voter fatigue. It collapsed because the Congress treated the alliance like a property dispute, not a coalition. Seat-sharing became a trench war. Candidates were announced when the campaign had already lost its pulse. The smaller parties felt hustled, not courted. What was seen as chaos was really choreography.
Because beneath the mismanagement lies the political fact no one in Lutyens wants to say out loud: any young national-level rival in the North—whether Tejashwi in Bihar, Akhilesh in UP, or even a rising face in Gujarat—is a long-term threat to Rahul Gandhi. And the only way Rahul stays indispensable is by ensuring these regional leaders never grow tall enough to look him in the eye. When it comes to non-North leaders like Uddhav Thackeray in Maharashtra, Dayanidhi Maran in Tamil Nadu, Abhishek Banerjee in Bengal, Rahul has no such anxiety. They’re charismatic, yes. Some come from dynasties as weighty as his. But they’re regional royalty, not national contenders. They do not threaten the geography he covets: the belt that determines Delhi. They are safer allies simply because their ceiling is built into their house plan.
That is the backdrop to his curious campaign messaging in Bihar. Faced with bread-and-butter issues such as jobs, migration, governance, Rahul chose “vote chori”, an allegation so abstract it can neither be verified nor disproved. A slogan designed not to ignite the masses but to drown out any rival narrative. A weak plank chosen not by mistake but by method: if the campaign’s central idea can’t lift the alliance, then no one within it can emerge as its hero. There is a colder, more strategic Rahul at work these days. The transformation began with his Yatra, that long, myth-making pilgrimage where he shed the Pappu label and stepped into a new self—part ascetic, part influencer, part rebel prince. He realised he could be both Rahulji and the perennial youth icon. He could be a Gandhi without the earlier stiffness. The tobogganing with Priyanka afterwards wasn’t frivolous optics; it was a rebrand that said: “Only I can be both insider and outsider.”
This is a family with a storied tradition of eliminating rivals. Indira did it ruthlessly within the Congress. Sonia did it politely, but no less effectively. Rahul cannot repeat their model inside the party which is too emaciated for a purge. So he has innovated: he is doing it outside. Shrink the space around potential national stars. Limit their oxygen. Let them shine in their states but never beyond them. Offer friendship, maintain hierarchy.
Note the philosophical echo here; Machiavelli’s old warning that the prince must ensure no parallel centres of loyalty arise. Rahul has absorbed that maxim, not in the medieval European sense, but in the modern Indian one. He has inherited a party but lost a country; now he wants both back, not today, not even tomorrow, but inevitably. This slow, patient consolidation creates a paradoxical figure of a man who can lose without breaking, who can retreat without disappearing, who can bide his time because he knows time is his ally. He is playing for the moment when age, fatigue, and political overreach catch up with everyone else. And that sets up the most provocative truth of all: think of Rahul Gandhi as the joke of Indian politics at your peril. He is shaping up to be its most durable contestant, the one man who outlasts rivals rather than outshines them.
So here is the real ending of Bihar’s story, the one no party spokesman will admit or even acknowledge: the underdog who plans to own the yard knows the last dog standing will become the top dog.