Why new Bihar Congress leadership is ruffling old ally RJD

Also read: 'Why would we join hands': Tejashwi rules out realignment with Nitish Kumar

Quartet at work

Kumar’s appointment was cleared by Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge on Tuesday (March 18).

A second-term MLA and Dalit leader known to keep a low profile, Kumar replaces Rajya Sabha MP Akhilesh Prasad Singh, who belongs to the upper caste Bhumihar community.

Completing the Congress’ Bihar quartet are Krishna Allavaru, a key Rahul Gandhi aide, who replaced veteran leader Mohan Prakash as the party’s Bihar in-charge last month, and two leaders known to share a rocky relationship with the RJD’s first family – Kanhaiya Kumar and Pappu Yadav.

Bringing in Kanhaiya Kumar

Sources in the Bihar Congress say drafting in Kanhaiya and Yadav was Allavaru’s first move after taking charge of the state. Both Kanhaiya and Yadav hold no official role in the Bihar Congress. That Allavaru, who has been travelling across Bihar to get first-hand feedback from party workers unlike previous party in-charges who preferred to largely operate from Patna or Delhi, has pushed Kanhaiya and Yadav to the vanguard of the party’s public outreach effort has already triggered speculations in Patna on how this strategy would impact the party’s alliance with the RJD.

Kanhaiya’s chance of being pitted as the consensus Opposition candidate against BJP’s Giriraj Singh from Bihar’s Begusarai Lok Sabha constituency in 2019 was scuttled by Lalu. Though the Opposition’s 'Mahagathbandhan', comprising RJD, JD (U), Congress and Left parties was still intact at the time, the RJD fielded senior leader Tanweer Hassan from Begusarai against Singh and Kanhaiya, who was then making his electoral debut as a CPI candidate.

The three-cornered contest ended with Kanhaiya finishing a distant second, polling around 2.70 lakh votes against Singh’s 6.92 lakh votes while Hassan finished third with 1.98 lakh votes. In 2021, when Kanhaiya switched from the CPI to the Congress, sources say Lalu secured an assurance from the Congress high command that the firebrand former JNU Students Union president will be kept away from Bihar politics.

It was ostensibly under these terms that Kanhaiya was made in-charge of the party’s student wing, the NSUI, moved back to Delhi and, in last year’s general elections, fielded as the joint Congress-AAP candidate against BJP’s Manoj Tiwari from the Northeast Delhi seat. Incidentally, in the same election, the RJD readily ceded the Begusarai seat to the CPI, whose candidate Awadhesh Rai lost against Singh while Kanhaiya too lost in Northeast Delhi.

Watch: Political vendetta or legitimate probe? ED summons Lalu Yadav in land-for-jobs case

Break alliance with RJD: Pappu Yadav

Like Kanhaiya, Pappu Yadav too has a rocky past with the RJD.

Once a rising star in the RJD, Yadav had a bitter falling out with Lalu and was eventually expelled from the party in 2010. Ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, Yadav merged his fledgling Jan Adhikar Party with the Congress hoping the Congress high command would prevail upon Lalu and Tejashwi to spare the Purnea seat for him.

This, however, was not to be. With the RJD staking claim to the Purnea seat, Congress denied a ticket to the Seemanchal strongman.

After a defiant Yadav entered the poll fray as an independent, the RJD, which has never won the Purnea seat, poached JD (U) MLA Bima Bharti, fielded her as its candidate from the seat and even got Tejashwi to canvass extensively for her. Despite the odds, Yadav managed to wrest the Purnea seat with a slender margin of 23,000 votes against Santosh Kushwaha of the JD (U) while Bharti could poll only 27,000 votes, forfeiting her deposit.

Ever since, Yadav, now a sixth-term Lok Sabha MP, has been publicly hitting out at the RJD and asserting that the Congress must break its alliance with Lalu if it wants to rebuild itself in the state. “I have the greatest respect for Laluji but the Congress cannot become the force it once was in Bihar if its politics is dictated by the RJD,” Yadav told The Federal.

Also read: Tejashwi promises '100 per cent domicile policy' in Bihar if voted to power

Prioritising revival

Allavaru’s decision to bring Kanhaiya back to Bihar’s politics with the task of leading the Congress’s ongoing pan-state ‘Palayan Roko, Naukri Do’ (stop migration, give jobs) Yatra while also seeking Yadav’s active involvement in outreach programmess has forced many to wonder if the Congress is prioritising its revival over putting a united fight, alongside the RJD, against the combined electoral might of the NDA for the upcoming Bihar polls.

Congress sources say Rajesh Kumar’s appointment, close on the heels of Kanhaiya and Yadav being moved to the frontline of the party’s revival plan, signals the high command’s willingness to “truncate Lalu and Tejashwi’s influence over the Congress’s functioning in Bihar”.

A senior Bihar Congress MLA told The Federal that Kumar’s predecessor Akhilesh Prasad Singh was widely believed to be “running the Congress as per Lalu’s instructions” and “sabotaging party interest to ensure RJD’s electoral footprint remains intact”.

Sources say a section of Bihar Congress leaders had repeatedly told Rahul Gandhi that Singh had “conceded winnable Lok Sabha seats of the Congress to the RJD during seat-sharing talks for the 2024 polls only so that the RJD doesn’t stake claim for the Maharajganj seat because he wanted a ticket for his son from there”. The Congress did field Singh’s son, Akash Prasad, from Maharajganj, a constituency the party had last won in 1984, but Akash lost the election by over one lakh votes.

Sources say Allavaru’s own appointment as Bihar in-charge was the first sign that the high command had finally decided to “heed the wishes of state leaders and act against Singh for functioning like Lalu’s agent in the Congress.” “For the first time in decades, we got an in-charge whose first stop in Patna was at the Congress office and not Lalu Yadav’s residence,” a Congress functionary said.

A former Bihar Congress chief said, “from the day Allavaru was made in-charge, we knew Singh’s days as PCC president were numbered… even Singh understood this and tried to create problems for Allavaru from day one; he and his supporters kept complaining that Allavaru’s decision to rope in Kanhaiya and Pappu for Congress’ outreach programmes will create problems with the RJD but fortunately the high command did not listen to him”.

Balancing caste-equations

With Kumar as PCC chief and Kanhaiya and Yadav back in the limelight, the Congress has also sought to balance caste-equations in Bihar.

“This is a good team. Allavaru has Rahul’s ear so he can give the right feedback to Delhi. Kumar is a grassroots leader from the Dalit community. Kanhaiya is a Bhumihar, like Singh, while Pappu Yadav has a good hold on his Yadav community and also on the Muslims of Seemanchal. Aside from these, of our three Lok Sabha MPs, Manoj Kumar is a Dalit while Tariq Anwar and Mohammed Jawed are Muslims. So we have a good leadership of Dalits, who account for 20 percent of the state’s population, Muslims and Yadavs who are at 17 and 14 percent, respectively,” a party MLA told The Federal.

Aggressively courting Dalits and OBCs has been a key part of Rahul’s plan of reviving the Congress as protecting interests of the two communities, alongwith the Muslims, also forms the central pivot of his twin narratives of the need for a nationwide caste census and ‘Save Constitution’.

A section of Congress leaders believe having a Dalit Congress chief both at the national and state level sends the right message about the party promoting leadership from the community but it also serves another key purpose.

“The RJD, despite Tejashwi’s growing popularity, still doesn’t enjoy confidence of the Dalit community because of the atrocities it faced from Yadavs when Lalu and Rabri Devi were CMs. In straight electoral contests, whether in Lok Sabha or in Assembly elections, the RJD loses most Dalit constituencies to the BJP, JD (U) or to parties of Dalit leaders like (LJP-RV chief) Chirag Paswan and (HAM chief) Jitan Ram Manjhi. If the community sees hope of a resurgent Congress, we are confident it will move to us and we will be in a better position to bargain with the RJD instead of being at Lalu’s mercy,” Murari Gautam, Congress MLA from the SC-reserved Chenari seat said.

Also read: Amid friction, NDA to put up a united face ahead of Bihar polls

RJD response

While RJD insiders admit that the Congress aggressively reaching out to Dalits would be mutually beneficial to both parties in the election, they caution that the Grand Old Party’s increasing reliance on leaders who have strained ties with Lalu and Tejashwi could “create a trust deficit” in the alliance before the elections.

“As a party, the Congress can choose to promote anyone within its ranks who it thinks can strengthen the party because it has nothing on the ground of its own; it is the RJD that is keeping the Congress relevant in Bihar. So instead of promoting people who openly criticise the RJD, the Congress leadership should show us some gratitude… it is one thing to promote Kanhaiya and Pappu Yadav if the Congress leadership is certain that this will help their party grow but then with elections just seven months away, when these people attack the RJD, they only help the BJP and Nitish,” an RJD spokesperson told The Federal.

An RJD MP admitted that his party stood to “gain Dalit votes because of our alliance with the Congress and also parties like the CPI-ML and CPI” but quickly added that the Congress’ central leadership “should not be under any misguided impression that in seven months they can rebuild the party… they need the RJD more than we need them but if they attack and insult us, we will have to take harsh decisions too”.

This MP, a confidante of Lalu, said both Lalu and Tejashwi have, for now, decided to “wait and watch the attitude of the new Congress team towards us” as they “do not want to destabilise the alliance and help the NDA win Bihar again”.