Its strike rate of 27% turned out to be lowest among all parties in fray

The Congress continued to play a spoilsport for its alliance partners. This time the party marred the prospect of the RJD-led Grand Alliance’s bid to oust Nitish Kumar-led NDA Government in Bihar.

 Its strike rate of around 27 per cent turned out to be the lowest among all the parties in fray. The strike rate of even small regional parties, like Vikassheel Insan Party (VIP) of Mukesh Sahni, which is part of the NDA is 50 per cent, almost double of Congress.

Despite of raking up the core issues like unemployment and price rise, the grand old party whose  campaign was led by former party chief Rahul Gandhi, the Congress emerged as the “villain” for Tejashwi Yadav. In the last Assembly elections, the Congress contested 42 seats as part of Grand Alliance consisting of the RJD and the JD(U) and won 25 seats.

On most of the seats the Congress contested against the BJP, the former trailed. Rahul Gandhi had campaigned extensively in Bihar, but lack of party organisation and reports of irregularities in ticket distribution seemed to have queered the pitch for it.

Initially the Congress was attempting to armtwist the RJD to contest on more seats but Tejashwi limited the Congress to 70 seats and the RJD took 144. Political analysts said if Tejashwi had not given in to the Congress demand,  the Opposition alliance may have been in a better position by dint of the RJD’s performance.

The RJD in its initial round of discussion had agreed to give the Congress a maximum of 48 seats only but the grand old party forced to increase the number and the seat sharing was adjusted only after the intervention of RJD patriarch Lalu Prasad.

In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the RJD-Congress partnership too flopped when the NDA swept the polls, winning 39 of 40 seats, and the Congress secured one Lok Sabha seat while RJD’s tally remained zero.

In the Modi era, the Congress has now become a liability on the alliance partners and slowly one party after another is discarding it. In Tamil Nadu, the DMK blamed the poor strike rate of the Congress for its performance as it won only eight seats out of 41 it contested in 2016 Assembly elections.

Similarly, in the Uttar Pradesh election in 2017, the Congress won only seven seats out of 105 it contested. In almost every State, whenever a regional party allies with Congress, the chances of its victory gets further reduced, given the poor strike rate of the party. In States like UP, Bihar, Jharkhand, Tamil

Nadu, the grand old has to take a piggy ride on the regional players.