To a national leader with no determinate voter base, caste fealty, or proven experience in governance, the states are low-hanging fruits ready to be plucked, eaten, and savoured with an aftertaste of power. More so if a state falls in the Hindi heartland that still claims to offer the country its highest number of prime ministers.
Rahul Gandhi fits the template. But in all fairness, he realised that just being a legatee from a premier political clan is not enough to reach for even a low-hanging fruit. Success is hard to get to in present-day politics, marked by a fluid social order in the wake of movements to empower the Other Backward Classes and Dalits, communal conflicts and, importantly, the emergence of a system that seems to increasingly make space for individuals with no pedigree to rise to the highest office through hard work and a smidgen of luck.
Luck has not been on Rahul’s side so far. Going against the Congress’s grain and its traditional aversion to cohabit with smaller parties, he has had to compromise and forge alliances with entities and leaders who might have counted for nothing in the party’s glorious decades. Rahul’s campaigns in the recent past have been exceptionally aggressive towards the ruling BJP and its constituents, even if they have not yielded tangible outcomes.
Now, Rahul is spearheading the attack on the Election Commission (EC) for allegedly fudging voters’ lists and gerrymandering results to favour the party in power at the Centre and most states, at every tier of the power hierarchy including local bodies. The campaign was spurred by the EC’s inexplicable move to conduct a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the Bihar electoral rolls just months before the state votes in October/November. The Congress is in alliance with the Rashtriya Janata Dal, the Left parties and the Vikassheel Insaan Party. The BJP’s ally Nitish Kumar, who heads the Janata Dal (United), has been in power for 20 years—a record in politically volatile Bihar—by striking opportunistic deals. The RJD and its partners believe they can dislodge Nitish on the back of a widely-perceived anti-incumbency sentiment against his government.
But is a sustained campaign imbued with a crusading zeal against the EC’s alleged omissions and commissions enough to see the back of Nitish? Certainly, Rahul is convinced it can. In and out of parliament’s just-concluded session, Rahul mobilised the support of almost the entire non-BJP spectrum of parties who fear that if an SIR is carried out in their states, the spectre of defeat would loom large. West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, which have non-BJP governments, are examples.
Bihar is where the battle began to save the soul of democracy encapsulated in the one-person-one-vote precept enshrined in the Constitution. The BJP and its allies have regrouped under the NDA’s banner, while the RJD and its partners have formed the Mahagatbandhan (MGB)—so the battle lines are firmly etched.
A state election is eventually fought on local issues and helmed by a local leader or a coalition of leaders, even if a national cataclysm overwhelms the political landscape. Rahul, who apparently hopes to validate his national aspirations by using states as a vehicle, is reprising his Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra with a 20-day Voter Adhikar (Voter Rights) peregrination in the state that started with a rally at Sasaram.
The difference emerging in the impending election and the last assembly poll in 2020 is Tejashwi Yadav, Lalu Prasad’s political heir and the chief protagonist five years ago. Rahul was almost absent in that campaign. Under Tejashwi’s stewardship, the RJD emerged as the single largest party followed closely by the BJP, while Nitish’s JD(U) stood a poor third. Like other present-day inheritors, Tejashwi did not have it easy to begin with. He had to contend with his parents’ legacy—his mother Rabri Devi was an ‘accidental chief minister’—that was besmirched with charges ranging from corruption to criminalisation. Instead of answering the rivals’ political assaults, he apologised for the mistakes Lalu and Rabri Devi committed during a 15-year regime.
In the prelude to the 2020 polls, Tejashwi seized upon the pandemic not to assail the Centre or the Bihar government, but start free kitchens for the hordes of migrants who returned home from as far as Delhi and other places. Instead of joining issues with the BJP and JD(U) on issues such as Hindutva, nationalism and Pakistan, or counter Nitish’s barbs about his lack of education (he didn’t complete high school), Tejashwi focused on the plight of the poor—which remains a major talking point, as the continuing outflow of job-seeking migrants proves.
However, taking Rahul’s cue in Sasaram—where the venue was jam-packed with RJD workers and supporters—Tejashwi too stuck to the tirade against the EC, warning the BJP it couldn’t befool the people of Bihar by rigging voter rolls. Rahul ensured that the optics were appropriate. He said he would want Tejashwi in the driver’s seat, but stopped short of declaring him the MGB’s chief ministerial candidate, which the RJD has already done.
If Rahul amps up the anti-EC campaign, what happens to the issues that have exercised voters, such as unemployment, which Prashant Kishor has amplified ? Kishor, a former political consultant to nearly every party who has floated the Jan Suraaj Party, has hit the ground running because he intends to contest all the 243 seats in the state on his own.
Rahul clearly aims to bolster his national profile via Bihar, and in making his ambition clear, the Congress will waste no time demanding tickets disproportionate to its ground presence. Ironically, just after Rahul’s yatra was announced, the Congress’s working president, sixth-term MLA Ashok Kumar Ram, quit and joined the JD(U).
While the Congress has no choice but to piggyback on the RJD, it is incumbent on Tejashwi to rise from the debris of the MGB’s Lok Sabha poll debacle and demonstrate that the Yadav dynasty is still a force to reckon with. To reach the goal, he needs to pick on his rival Nitish instead of a statutory body like EC, which seems faceless to the people.
Radhika Ramaseshan | Columnist and political commentator
(Views are personal)