Of nine Bihar seats in its quota, Congress hasn’t won 7 for decades

Aksheev Thakur

New Delhi, April 5

Senior Congress leaders in Bihar feel that the senior leadership of the party did not assert itself enough to demand those seats from its alliance partner RJP where its leaders could have won. Instead, the party “wilted before” the RJD and ended up getting those seats from where it has lost for decades, the leaders said.

RJD gave us weak seats

Khagaria, from where CPM will contest for the first time, was a seat which we demanded. The Congress has won the seat thrice. Aurangabad was the dominant seat of Rajput leaders and one of Congress’s strong seat. Sheohar seat was also demanded by the Congress but it went to the RJD. The party has allocated to the Congress seats from where the latter has no chance to win. senior bihar cong leader

Other than Kishanganj and Katihar, the party has not won any of the remaining seven seats it has been “given” by the RJD in Bihar for several decades.

In Muzaffarpur and Maharajganj, the Congress had last won in 1984. The Patna Sahib constituency has been with the BJP since 2009 and the Congress loses by a huge margin there.

In the 1998 Lok Sabha polls, the RJD gave 21 seats to the Congress. The number of seats given to Congress was reduced to 16 in 1999 and in 2004, the number came down to four and in 2009, it went down to three. In 2014 polls, the RJD gave 12 seats and in 2019, again reduced them to nine. In 2019, the Congress won the lone Opposition seat in Bihar.

It has been 33 years since the Congress was last in power in the eastern state. Former Bihar Congress chief Anil Sharma, who resigned and joined BJP earlier this month, said: “I fail to understand why the Congress supports the RJD, which is synonymous with jungle raj. RJD is a casteist party that has treated Congress like a beggar.”

“Khagaria, from where CPM will contest for the first time, was a seat which we demanded. The Congress has won the seat thrice. Aurangabad was the dominant seat of Rajput leaders and one of Congress’s strong seat. Nikhil Kumar, former IPS was considered but that seat went to RJD. Sheohar seat was also demanded by the Congress but it went to RJD. The RJD has given tickets to Congress for the seats from where the party has no chance to win,” another senior Congress leader from Bihar told The Tribune.