New Delhi: Inside three weeks of the Opposition’s drubbing within the Bihar meeting elections, the Congress-RJD alliance within the state has successfully unravelled, with senior leaders in each events buying and selling blame for the defeat, and a few even taking their sparring public.

Sources mentioned the Congress excessive command has instructed the state management to concentrate on strengthening its presence on the grassroots-level. This comes amid a rising clamour within the decrease ranks that the get together’s affiliation with the RJD had turn out to be its greatest “stumbling block”.

“The problem earlier than me is to strengthen my organisation. Alliances are made for elections, which aren’t due anytime quickly. So, any dialogue on the alliance isn’t related at this level,” Ram mentioned. He was responding to a query about RJD state chief Mangani Lal Mandal’s remark that the Congress was free to exit the alliance if it wished so.

Final Saturday, Mandal had squarely blamed the Congress for the Opposition’s crushing defeat and challenged it to contest future elections alone to grasp its actual energy. He claimed that the six seats the Congress received had been secured solely due to the RJD’s help base.

Responding to Mandal Tuesday, Ram mentioned: “If we contested 61 seats and received six, even they received solely 26 of the 147 they contested. It’s a collective defeat. Everybody has misplaced, not simply us.”

Congress insiders mentioned the get together isn’t significantly perturbed by the RJD’s perspective. The Bihar unit has already obtained directions from the excessive command to attract up a technique that follows an unbiased political and organisational line.

“Many state leaders tried to impress upon the management even earlier than the elections that staying aligned with the RJD may hurt the get together in the long run. We identified that the Congress can not proceed to depend on a celebration that pushed it to the margins within the first place,” a senior Bihar Congress chief advised ThePrint Tuesday.

Based on the chief, on the get together assembly in Delhi final week to overview its ballot efficiency, the excessive command lastly appeared receptive to this view. The state unit was directed to observe the coverage of “ekla chalo” (stroll alone) in the meanwhile.

“The style during which the RJD refused to withdraw its candidates from sure seats and compelled so-called pleasant fights, even after the Congress accepted Tejashwi Yadav because the alliance’s chief ministerial candidate, reveals the contempt with which it treats us,” the Congress chief mentioned.

On the assembly, many contestants additionally rued the shortage of coordination among the many allies in the course of the polls.

Forward of the elections, a senior office-bearer of the Congress, who has all the time been in opposition to any alliance with the RJD, had advised ThePrint: “You ask why the Congress retains sinking in Bihar? As a result of it’s sacrificing its future for short-term good points. Inform me, how will you develop a celebration in a constituency if you don’t even know whether or not your candidate will get to contest from there? Khet toh hamara poora banjar hai (our complete area lies fallow).”

The Congress, which final received an election in Bihar in 1985 and has since been a marginal power within the state’s politics, eclipsed first by the rise of RJD’s Lalu Prasad and later by JD(U)’s Nitish Kumar, registered a strike fee of simply 9.8 p.c within the polls this time. That is near its worst efficiency in 2010, when it received 4 seats.

Congress leaders concerned within the Bihar marketing campaign now say the coolness in relations with the RJD started in the course of the Voter Adhikar Yatra led by senior chief Rahul Gandhi in September.

After the yatra, Gandhi travelled to South America and returned to Bihar solely within the final week of October, by which period seat-sharing talks had turned bitter. In the course of the marketing campaign, Gandhi and Tejashwi Yadav addressed solely a handful of joint rallies, and the heat seen in the course of the launch of the yatra was lacking.

(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)

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