Buoyed by vote-share rise, RJD must solve voter-base riddle by 2025 Bihar polls

The Lok Sabha poll results from Bihar have a mix of silver linings and red flags for Lalu Yadav and Tejashwi Yadav’s RJD and their mahagathbandhan (grand alliance) partners, the Congress and the Left parties.

Unlike the alliance between Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party and the Congress, which trumped the BJP and its allies in Uttar Pradesh, the mahagathbandhan’s poll performance in Bihar was way below its own expectations. Despite a visible groundswell of support for Tejashwi across Bihar, the RJD ended with just four wins across the 23 seats it contested.

With the Congress winning three of the nine constituencies it contested, the CPI-ML wresting two seats, and the Congress’s Pappu Yadav, who fought as an Independent candidate, bagging Purnea, the grand alliance collectively triumphed in just 10 of the state’s 40 Lok Sabha constituencies.

NDA’s performance

In contrast, the NDA triumphed in 30 seats with a combined vote share of nearly 46 per cent — a nearly 10 per cent lead over the mahagathbandhan. Nitish Kumar’s JD(U) and the BJP each bagged 12 seats while Chirag Paswan’s LJP (RV) won all five constituencies it contested.

HAM chief Jitan Ram Manjhi too won the Gaya seat, leaving BJP ally and RLP chief Upendra Kushwaha, who lost to Raja Ram Singh of the CPI-ML in Karakat, as the only major NDA partner who failed to taste victory in Bihar.

RJD’s vote share

Yet, despite its humble seat tally, the RJD shored up the highest individual vote share among all political parties. While the RJD registered a vote share of 22.14 per cent, an over 6 per cent jump from its 15.68 per cent mark of 2019, BJP’s share of 20.52 per cent across the 17 seats it contested was an over 2 per cent drop from its 2019 performance. The Congress, too, saw a marginal increase in its vote share, up from the 7.85 per cent of 2019 to 9.20 per cent this time round.

The JD(U), written off by many ahead of the polls due to Nitish’s frequent political somersaults, which commentators claimed had massively eroded his credibility, saw a steep fall in its vote share of 22.26 per cent in 2019 to 18.52 per cent in 2024. However, this didn’t stop the JD(U) from winning 12 of the 16 seats it contested. Chirag Paswan’s LJP (RV), too, saw a slight drop in its vote share, registering 6.47 per cent in the current election against the 8.01 per cent it had cornered five years ago.

Why RJD is upbeat

As the mahagathbandhan now gears up for its next big electoral battle, the Bihar Assembly polls due in October 2025, it would no doubt return to the drawing board to draw up a fresh strategy that could convert the gains in its vote share to gains in its seat share. The RJD, despite the setback of the Lok Sabha polls, has been buoyant about its electoral prospects in next year’s Assembly polls.

Manoj Jha, the party’s Rajya Sabha MP and chief spokesperson told The Federal that it would be “wrong to say that the RJD and its allies performed badly.”

“If you examine the results constituency-wise, the RJD lost three seats (Araria, Saran, and Sheohar) this time with margins of less than 30,000 votes and another seven seats (Munger, Sitamarhi, Valmiki Nagar, Ujiarpur, Nawada, and Vaishali) with margins of less than one lakh votes. Our allies, the VIP and the CPI, also lost one seat each — Purvi Champaran and Begusarai — with margins of less than one lakh votes. In 2019, we had lost a majority of these seats with margins of two lakh or more votes. So, we have significantly reduced the JD (U) and BJP’s leads and in several Assembly segments that fall in these constituencies, the RJD actually registered good leads. Now we have to build on these gains,” Jha said.

But, a lot more needs to be done

The RJD’s impressive vote share and the relatively modest victory margins of the BJP and JD (U) candidates may rightly breed optimism for Tejashwi, who almost single-handedly led the mahagathbandhan’s charge against the NDA partners across Bihar. His party also believes that Tejashwi’s aggressive campaign on the issue of job creation for Biharis would yield greater electoral gains in the Assembly elections than it did in the Lok Sabha polls.

Yet, mahagathbandhan leaders admit that their alliance still has “a lot of ground to cover” before they can hope to take the reins of power in Patna. There is a realisation within the alliance that the Lok Sabha elections also exposed “some worrying fissures and fault lines in the RJD’s core MY vote bank of Muslims and Yadavs,” said an RJD candidate who narrowly lost the elections.

The problem with MY votes

A section of RJD and Congress leaders believe that unlike UP, where the SP and Congress secured Yadav and Muslim votes en masse, besides those of other non-Yadav OBCs and a majority of Dalit sub-castes because of Akhilesh Yadav’s PDA (Pichchda, Dalit, Alpsankhyak) pitch, the MY vote in Bihar was “no longer a consolidated chunk” stridently backing the RJD.

“It is difficult to say whether this is the result of BJP’s Hindutva or Nitish’s governance or something else, but it is a fact that in constituencies where our alliance did not have a Yadav candidate, a chunk of Yadav votes went to our rivals. In Madhubani, which has nearly five lakh Muslim and two lakh Yadav voters, our candidate (MAA Fatmi) lost by over 1.50 lakh votes largely because the Yadav vote shifted to the BJP, which fielded Ashok Yadav, while in Araria, where our candidate Shahnawaz Alam lost by just 20,000 votes, we had to face the additional challenge of seven Muslim candidates entering the fray as Independents and collectively polling over 53,000 votes,” added the RJD candidate quoted earlier.

Need for urgent analysis

A Bihar Congress leader told The Federal that the Grand Alliance, the RJD in particular, needs to “urgently analyse why communities and caste groups who traditionally voted for us are not consolidating behind our candidates like before even as we are getting support of other caste groups who didn’t vote for us earlier”.

The Congress leader said if this “baffling riddle” is not solved soon, the alliance will face a sterner challenge in ensuring victory of its Muslim candidates in the Assembly polls. He recalled how, of the 17 Muslim candidates the RJD had fielded in the 2020 Assembly polls, only eight had managed to win while the Congress too struggled to retain its seats in Muslim-dominated constituencies of the state’s impoverished Seemanchal region as Asaduddin Owaisi’s AIMIM walked away with five MLAs.

“Consolidating Muslim votes and ensuring that Hindu communities who back us also ensure our win in seats where we field Muslims is going to be a major task because we face twin challenges. On the one hand, we have to fight polarisation caused by the BJP, which I suspect breaks away our Hindu voters in seats where we field Muslims and, on the other, we also have to protect our Muslim votes from splitting because of the AIMIM. In the Kishanganj Lok Sabha constituency, our candidate (Mohammed Jawed) won by over 59,000 votes but we can’t dismiss the fact that both his rivals, Mujahid Alam of the JD(U) and AIMIM’s Akhtarul Iman, polled over 3 lakh votes each. If the Muslims were consolidating behind RJD and Congress, like they did in UP, Jawed should have won the seat with one of the highest margins in Bihar,” the Congress leader explained.

Caste equations

Bridging fissures within the MY vote bank aside, Tejashwi, say mahagathbandhan sources, also needs to work harder to make his party and the wider Grand Alliance more acceptable to other caste groups.

“We have had some success this time by breaking away Kushwaha votes from the JD(U) and the BJP while the presence of the CPI-ML in the alliance has also brought in votes of certain oppressed communities who never voted alongside the Yadavs earlier but these communities are small in number... we need to bring two or more other major caste groups into our fold and intensify such social engineering efforts. The Lok Sabha results clearly show that the EBCs and Mahadalits are still firmly with the NDA not because of Modi but on account of leaders like Nitish, Chirag Paswan and Jitan Ram Manjhi. The Congress also needs to think why, despite having a Dalit national president (Mallikarjun Kharge) and giving the first ever woman Dalit Lok Sabha Speaker (Meira Kumar, a former Lok Sabha MP from Bihar’s Sasaram), it has not been able to attract Dalits in Bihar,” a CPI-ML MLA told The Federal.

Grand Alliance’s “natural disadvantage”

The Left party legislator added that the Grand Alliance is “at a natural disadvantage” when compared to the NDA’s social engineering in Bihar because “whether it is the BJP’s state leadership or their allies like Nitish, Chirag and Manjhi, all of them essentially command control over one or the other major caste group of the state which collectively give them a huge vote bank... in contrast, our alliance is largely driven by Tejashwi alone; we lack strong caste leaders and have to rely on Lalu and Tejashwi’s appeal or on the lure of our poll promises... anyone who understands Bihar politics will know this is hardly a match for caste-based electoral strategy”.

Another senior RJD leader who narrowly lost the Lok Sabha polls said the RJD also needs to figure out why it has been unable to break the NDA’s winning streak beyond the state’s Shahabad-Magadh and Seemanchal regions. Of the 10 seats in the mahagathbandhan’s kitty, seven (Aurangabad, Karakat, Sasaram, Buxar, Arrah, Jahanabad and Patliputra) are from the Shahabad-Magadh region alone while the remaining three — Kishanganj, Katihar and Purnea — are from Seemanchal. The alliance drew a blank across the electorally vast and crucial Champaran, Tirhut, Mithila and Kosi regions.

Pappu Yadav factor

Some mahagathbandhan leaders also believe that Lalu and Tejashwi’s “obstinate refusal to leave the Purnea seat for Pappu Yadav” cost the party dear in constituencies like Supaul, Madhepura, Araria and Bhagalpur.

“They (Lalu and Tejashwi) should have shown a large heart and spared the Purnea seat for Congress and Pappu Yadav. Whether Tejashwi likes it or not, Pappu has a clout in Purnea and the adjoining constituencies of Kosi Seemanchal. By making it a prestige issue, poaching Bima Bharti from the JD(U) so that she can be fielded from Purnea, Tejaswhi irked Pappu’s supporters across four-five constituencies and it damaged the alliance... what did Tejashwi achieve after all this? Pappu still won from Purnea; Bima Bharti lost her deposit and the alliance lost in Supaul, Madhepura, Bhagalpur, and Araria,” an alliance leader said.

Senior Congress leader Tariq Anwar, who won the Lok Sabha polls from Bihar’s Katihar seat, told The Federal that the mahagathbandhan will begin drawing up its Assembly poll strategy “after the upcoming Parliament session concludes on July 3”.

“Each of our constituents is already analysing how their respective candidates fared and where we lacked. We will sit down and begin collective discussions soon. There are obviously a lot of issues that we need to address; there have been some shortcomings also; maybe some places we could have chosen better candidates or where we could have worked harder to mobilise support. All these things we will look into. Vote share of all our allies has gone up even if we didn’t win more seats but we are confident that the assembly results will be in our favour,” Anwar said.