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Meeting at Kharge’s house after the defeat in Bihar: Rahul Gandhi was also present; Congress said – there were irregularities in the elections, will give proof in 2 weeks

After the crushing defeat in Bihar elections, Congress called its first review meeting in Delhi on Saturday. The meeting took place at the residence of party president Mallikarjun Kharge, in which Rahul Gandhi, KC Venugopal and Ajay Maken were present.

In the meeting, the leaders reviewed the election results, discussed the shortcomings of the organization and gave suggestions regarding the future strategy. According to sources, the party is now trying to understand why there was such a big defeat in Bihar.

After the meeting, Congress leaders have accused BJP of rigging the elections. Congress leader KC Venugopal said that the party is collecting evidence of irregularities. Will present it before the country in 2 weeks.

Actually, Congress fielded candidates on 60 seats in this election, but could win only 6 seats. The party’s vote share remained at 8.71%, whereas in 2020, while contesting 70 seats, it had won 19 seats and got 9.6% votes.

Maken said – there were irregularities at many places

After meeting Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge, senior party leaders have raised serious questions on the Bihar election results. Ajay Maken also said,

There have been questions on the election process since the beginning, so such results are shocking. Even in 1984, Congress did not get such a strike rate as BJP has got this time. Something is wrong. Our workers are continuously telling that irregularities have happened at many places.

Maken said all parties in the alliance consider the result “unexpected” and are demanding an investigation.

Major reasons for the defeat of Congress and Grand Alliance

From CM face to seat distribution, the Grand Alliance remained stuck

The seats of the Grand Alliance have not even reached 50. The main reason for this is the poor performance of RJD and Congress. Rahul and Tejashwi tried to unite the Grand Alliance through Voter Adhikar Yatra, but there was a split between them after Tejashwi was declared the CM face.

Later Congress also agreed to make Tejashwi the CM face, but by then the message was sent that there is rift between RJD and Congress. Its effect was visible from publicity to ticket distribution.

No ticket distribution till last minute

There was tension in the Grand Alliance till the last day of withdrawal of nominations for the first phase of elections. RJD and Congress remained adamant on seat sharing. The result was that candidates of all parties kept getting nominations, but it was not clear which party would contest on how many seats.

Ultimately RJD contested 146, Congress 59, VIP 13, CPI-ML 20, CPI 7, CPM 4 and IIP 2. 250 candidates of Grand Alliance contested on 241 seats. The grand alliance supported the independents in Sugauli seat of East Champaran and Mohania seat of Rohtas.

They fielded candidates against each other on 9 seats, but lost on all. After not being able to reach a consensus on the seats, the parties of the grand alliance started fielding candidates against each other. Due to this his voters got confused. This happened on a total of 9 seats.

Congress’s Shivprakash and CPI’s Awadhesh Kumar Rai contested from Bachhwara seat in Begusarai district. Here BJP’s Surendra Mehta won by 15,593 votes, getting 99,685. Congress got 84,092 votes and CPI 21,513 votes. If both are combined, the Grand Alliance has got 5,920 more votes than BJP.
Umair Khan of Congress and Shivkumar of CPI contested from Bihar Sharif seat of Nalanda district. Here BJP’s Dr. Sunil Kumar has won by 29,168 votes.
Congress’s Pratima and CPI’s Mohit Paswan were face to face in Rajapakar seat of Vaishali district. Here Mahendra Ram of JDU won by 48189 votes.
Sanjeev Kumar from Congress and Ajay Kushwaha from RJD contested from Vaishali seat. Here JDU’s Siddharth Patel won by 32,590 votes. RJD stood second, Congress third.
Uday Narayan Choudhary of RJD and Vinod Choudhary of Congress contested from Sikandra seat of Jamui district. Here Prafulla Kumar Manjhi of HAM won by 23,907 votes.
Rajneesh Bharti of RJD and Praveen Kushwaha of Congress contested from Kahalgaon seat of Bhagalpur district. Here Subhanand Mukesh of JDU has won by 50,112 votes.
Lalan Kumar Yadav from Congress and Chandan Kumar Singh from RJD contested from Sultanganj seat. From here, JDU’s Lalit Narayan Mandal won by 31,136 votes.
Santosh Mishra from Congress and Mahendra Sahu from CPI-ML contested from Karghar seat in Rohtas district. JDU’s Vashishtha Singh won from here by 35,365 votes. Congress stood third, CPI seventh.
Brajkishore Bind from RJD and Balgovind Bind from VIP contested from Chainpur seat of Kaimur. JDU’s Jama Khan won from here by 8,362 votes.

Both promises and issues are ineffective

From the beginning of the elections, Congress and RJD made SIR, vote theft and Nitish Kumar’s health issues. Voter Adhikar Yatra was taken out on the issue of vote theft. Crowd gathered in this, but it did not translate into votes. Tejashwi took over the entire responsibility of the campaign. Rahul disappeared after the Voter Adhikar Yatra.

Tejashwi Yadav called Nitish an unconscious Chief Minister and raised questions on his health. He was described as mentally ill, but Nitish denied these things by holding 181 rallies in 25 days. Held an average of 7 meetings every day and preached for 8 hours.

Talking about promises, the Grand Alliance promised more help than the NDA scheme. Job to one member of every family, under Mai Bahin Yojana, women were promised lump sum amount of Rs 30 thousand, gas cylinder for Rs 500, free treatment up to Rs 25 lakh, 3 to 5 decimal land to landless families and 200 units of free electricity.

The biggest promise was to provide a job to every family, but questions were raised on this. According to the caste survey of 2023, there are 2.83 crore families in Bihar. 20 lakh people are already doing government jobs. There are only 3 lakh vacant posts. In such a situation, it is very difficult to provide jobs to 2.63 crore families.

People also did not take it seriously. Mahendra Malakar of Patna says in a humorous tone, ‘In the election environment, leaders can say anything. We can also say that make us the Chief Minister, we will give one lakh rupees each. Will take everyone to the sky and build houses. It is easy to say, but it is difficult to fulfill the promise after getting the chair.