Bihar: The rift in the Opposition

The RJD-Congress gulf shows how non-BJP parties don’t have their script in place

Bihar’s politics is undergoing a churn. While the focus in the last few months has been on the dynamic between the Nitish Kumar-led Janata Dal-United (JD-U) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), there appears to be even more trouble within the Opposition alliance. The Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and the Congress are old allies. But with the RJD fighting by-elections in two assembly seats on its own (the Congress was expecting the seat where it had fought in the 2020 assembly poll; Lalu Prasad said this would have meant losing the seat), the future of the alliance is uncertain.

While the RJD’s predecessor, the Janata Dal, ended the Congress dominance in the state by 1990, the rise of the BJP-Samata Party (the JD-U’s previous avatar) alliance led to the Congress reconciling itself to becoming a junior partner to Lalu Prasad at the state level by the late 1990s. In turn, Mr Prasad became a loyal ally of Sonia Gandhi at the national level through the United Progressive Alliance years. But within the Congress, there were always two impulses. To overcome its erosion in Bihar, one view held that the Congress must split from the RJD, rebuild its social base, and go it alone. Rahul Gandhi, at least before 2014, veered towards this view. Mr Gandhi was also, till Nitish Kumar went back to the BJP in 2017, more impressed with the JD-U than the RJD. The other, more pragmatic, view was that the Congress’s growth prospects in Bihar were limited, and it had little choice but to align with the RJD to fight the BJP. Sonia Gandhi was more partial to this view.

But things are changing. And there are two explanations. One, Tejashwi Yadav, the RJD’s next leader, is sceptical of Kanhaiya Kumar, who was wooed by and recently joined the Congress — and sees him as a possible rival in the anti-BJP political space, and as someone with the ability to build his support base. The RJD has read the former student leader’s entry into the Congress as a signal of the latter’s independent ambitions. Two, just like other regional parties, the RJD views the Congress as barely adding, perhaps even subtracting, from the electoral equation in the short-run. And, therefore, Mr Prasad and Mr Yadav see a mismatch between the Congress’s ambitions and reality. Both parties may merely be seeking to add to their bargaining power; they may well stick together; or there may be a realignment in Bihar before 2024. But the larger message, yet again, is that parties challenging the BJP don’t have their own house in order.