Congress gearing up for Bihar polls

Congress gearing up for Bihar polls

NEW DELHI: While its government faces the Opposition heat in Parliament, the Congress seems to be preoccupied with the coming Bihar Assembly polls slated to take place between October and November this year.

Up against formidable forces - high-on-performance Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and his predecessor desperate Lalu Prasad bent on retrieving his throne - the Congress is leaving no stones unturned to break into Bihar’s caste conundrum.

Once the ruling party in the state, the Congress is now a marginal presence. It managed to win only nine Assembly and two parliamentary seats in the last two Assembly elections.

But with the ‘young’ general secretary Rahul Gandhi keen on reviving the party’s fortune in the Hindi heartland ‘any which way’, the Congress party is putting its best foot forward to break even in a terrain which has nearly be come alien to its political culture.Realising that it can do little other than vigorously woo the minority voters in the state, the party has sent almost all its Muslim leaders to prepare the ground for Rahul’s road shows that are likely to take place in the second half of August.

One of the party leaders back from camping in Patna for three weeks, however, did not seem too optimistic.

“The general secretary will go, when the need arises and the ground is ready,” he said. In other words, if the going is better than what the party expects, the Rahul-card will be played, not otherwise. The party’s ‘youth icon’, after all, cannot be possibly be exposed to a flop show.

The Congress admittedly has only two options in Bihar to woe the minority community through promises of more Central Government-backed welfare schemes and impress the Dalits by tacitly projecting Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar.

On the first count, being a late-comer in the election scenario it has to match Bihar Chief Minister’s five years of assiduous wooing of the minority community. Kumar’s record is especially tough to match as he has managed to cosy up to the community despite the BJP being part of his government.

The Congress has also come to realise that the RJD chief Lalu’s once-invincible M-Y (Muslim-Yadav) factor is not entirely broken. The other vote bank which the Congress can hope to tap the upper caste is still largely with the BJP.

The Congress only hope is Nitish Kumar. That he would do a ‘Naveen Patnaik on the BJP’. The Congress game plan, therefore, is to make it really tough for Nitish to continue his alliance with the saffron party. And, for this, Gujarat has to play itself out in Bihar.

Author: Santwana Bhattacharya

Source: New Indian Express