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Two interesting developments took place in the Bihar election campaign on Monday, 19 October and both underline one thing.
Both developments reveal that Tejashwi Yadav appears to have slightly shaken the National Democratic Alliance, which till now seemed to be heading towards a clear victory in Bihar.
Rai's challenge in particular can even be seen as an acknowledgement that in the not-so-distant future, the politics of Bihar will revolve around two poles - the BJP and the RJD.
It's clear that what was predicted to be a one-sided Bihar election, has suddenly come alive. And the credit partly goes to a sharp campaign Tejashwi Yadav in the past few weeks.
This article will try and answer two questions:
Let’s begin with the first. There are three aspects to Tejashwi Yadav’s sudden revival. Let’s look at them one by one.
According to CVoter's survey data from October first week, close to 50 percent respondents in Bihar said that unemployment was the most important issue for them in this election. This was an increase of close to 25 percentage points from the survey two weeks ago.
This means that the proportion of people who consider jobs as the main issue doubled in two weeks. It is this sentiment that Tejashwi is trying to tap with a clear campaign focussed on this one issue.
Every speech he makes and most posters or social media creatives put up for his campaign focus on this one issue.
Tejashwi has made three major promises on this front:
This focus on jobs also dovetails well with Tejashwi's pre-poll alliance with the Congress and the three Left parties - CPI-ML, CPI and CPI-M. The idea of the alliance is to focus on the poor, unemployed and farmers and not so much on specific caste groups.
"The alliance shouldn't be seen as a coalition of caste-groups. Obviously certain caste groups vote for certain parties more than others and that will continue to happen. But the narrative and appeal our alliance should be broader," a strategist involved with Tejashwi's campaign said.
Apparently, it was this thinking that drove the RJD chief not to concede much to caste-based parties like the Vikassheel Insan Parishad or Rashtriya Lok Samata Party but make concessions to the Congress and Left Parties.
"A coalition of caste parties makes it seem that Tejashwi is just a Yadav leader or, at most, an MY (Muslim and Yadav) leader. That's not the narrative we want to push," the strategist said.
The relatively better co-ordination and ideological coherence within the RJD-led alliance is in sharp contrast to the confusion in the NDA.
Even though the BJP is contesting in alliance with the JD(U) under Nitish Kumar's leadership, it is widely believed that the party is also trying to undercut Kumar with a tacit deal with Chirag Paswan's Lok Janshakti Party.
Tejashwi's strategists also hope to project another contrast - between the incumbent CM with no new ideas and the a challenger with a clear job plan. Whether they are able to pull off this narrative remains to be seen.
However, it true that there’s a great deal of anti-incumbency against Nitish Kumar. CVoter’s latest survey revealed that 52.5 percent voters are angry with Kumar and want to vote him out. Another 28 percent said that they are angry but don’t want to vote him out. All Tejashwi needs is to get as much of the first category’s votes as possible.
Having said that, Tejashwi is still behind Nitish in the CVoter survey by over 10 percentage points as of now. He appears to be picking up to some extent. Political analyst Amitabh Tiwari pointed out that at least on Google trends, Tejashwi Yadav has caught up with Nitish Kumar.
There’s another aspect to this and that’s a party reflecting what its supporters want.
CVoter's last survey is interesting as they asked people their choice of party irrespective of alliances. 34 percent chose BJP, 26 percent chose RJD and only 14 percent chose the JD(U). The RJD is the second most popular party in the state and has chosen its most popular leader as the CM face, which is what a party should do.
However, no leader from the most popular party - the BJP - is even in the CM race. In fact, the party has conceded half the seats to the JD(U), despite the dissatisfaction against its leader Nitish Kumar, and this has created confusion among its voters in those seats, especially with the LJP trying to tap that vote as well.
Now, the surveys so far predicted a clear majority for the NDA with 140-160 seats and a 10-15 percent vote share lead over the Mahagathbandhan.
This is a huge gap to overcome, even if one factors in LJP spoiling JD(U)'s chances in a number of seats.
Here are some of the challenges that he would still need to overcome.
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)
Published: 19 Oct 2020,07:13 PM IST