Pushed around by INDIA allies, Congress does a tightrope over seats: Bihar to TN to Maharashtra

From Bihar to Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu to Uttar Pradesh, the Opposition INDIA bloc’s partners have either managed to push the Congress to the backfoot in seat sharing negotiations for the Lok Sabha elections, or are trying to do so.

Although upset at being pushed around, the Congress is left with few options, as it is a minor player in some of these states, and is heavily dependent on the bigger regional players.

It was no different in Bihar, where the Mahagathbandhan (grand alliance) announced its seat sharing formula for the state’s 40 seats Friday. Here too, the Congress did not get some of the seats it was asking for. The biggest setback was the RJD’s denial of the Purnia seat to the party. The Congress, which contested the seat as part of the RJD-led alliance in 2019, had sought the seat again for former MP Rajesh Ranjan alias Pappu Yadav, who recently merged his Jan Adhikar Party with the Congress amid fanfare.

Let alone Purnia, the RJD did not even concede Supaul, which was among the seats that Pappu Yadav had on his wishlist as replacement for Purnia. Yadav’s wife and AICC secretary Ranjeet Ranjan had represented the Supaul seat twice in the past — in 2004 and 2014. She was in the fray in 2019 as well.

Then there was Begusarai, where Kanhaiya Kumar was in the fray in 2019 as the CPI candidate. The Congress hoped to get the seat for Kumar, who joined the party in 2021, but the RJD gave it to the CPI once again. The RJD also denied the Congress the Aurangabad seat, where it wanted to field former governor and senior leader Nikhil Kumar. In 2019, the RJD had given the seat to Jitan Ram Manjhi’s Hindustani Awam Morcha, which is now with the BJP.

The only saving grace for the Congress was that after much hard-nosed