Bihar legislative council polls: Is Congress done riding pillion on RJD?

The eight legislative council seats that go to polls in Bihar on October 23 will not change the Vidhan Sabha, impact the ministries or decide who governs the state. They are teachers’ and graduates’ constituencies of the legislative council, voted on by a narrow electorate of registered teachers and degree-holders, with the terms of the sitting members ending on November 16.That is precisely why the manner in which the Congress has entered these contests matters, willing to risk unity for its own sake.The Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) moved first. Early September, it named candidates for six of the eight seats, leaving two open: Darbhanga Teachers, held by sitting Congress MLC (member of legislative council) and former state president Madan Mohan Jha, and Tirhut Teachers, held by the Communist Party of India (CPI). There was no seat-sharing negotiation.On October 1, the Congress high command responded to the RJD move. A list cleared by AICC general secretary (organisation) K.C. Venugopal put five Congress candidates in the field: Jha again from Darbhanga Teachers, Sanjay Yadav from Patna Teachers, Asadullah Khan from Patna Graduates, Rajnikant Pathak from Darbhanga Graduates, and Manoj Kumar Jaiswal from Kosi Graduates. Three of those graduates’ seats as well as Patna Teachers already had RJD nominees. After the Congress list, the RJD put Kumar Ray against Jha as well. The allies are now facing each other on five of the eight seats.The National Democratic Alliance (NDA), by contrast, divided the eight seats cleanly: four each between the BJP and Janata Dal (United).Congress state president Rajesh Ram has said there is no rift, that the real fight is with the NDA, and that the list only reflects the mood of workers. RJD leaders say the Left, Congress and their own party have long fought graduates’, teachers’ and local-body polls separately.Both statements can be true and still miss the point. A friendly fight on a council seat is a small thing. Choosing one after the senior partner has already published its list, and having that choice signed off in Delhi, is not.The Congress has ridden pillion in Bihar for the better part of two decades. It brought a thinning organisation; the RJD brought the Muslim-Yadav base and the claim to lead the Opposition. The bargain held while the RJD looked like the only vehicle that could carry anyone to power. That’s not the case anymore.In the November 2025 assembly elections, the RJD, which had won 75 seats in 2020, finished with just 25. The Congress fell from 19 seats to six. The Mahagathbandhan now holds about 35 seats in a legislative assembly of 243 seats.That weakness bared its first open crack in March. Five Rajya Sabha seats were filled on March 16. The quota for a first-preference win was 41. The Opposition, with 35 of its own and the promised support of five AIMIM (All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen) MLAs and the lone Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) member, was within reach of one seat. It fielded Amarendra Dhari Singh, the RJD’s sitting member, seeking a second term.Four legislators did not vote: Congress MLAs Surendra Kushwaha from Valmiki Nagar, Manoj Biswas from Forbesganj and Manohar Prasad from Manihari, and the RJD’s Faisal Rahman from Dhaka. Singh finished on 37 first-preference votes. The NDA took all five, including the fifth seat for the BJP’s Shivesh Kumar.The Congress served show-cause notices. The absentees offered reasons, among them that they had not been valued by the RJD and that a text message from the state president was not consultation. The CPI(ML) accused the Congress of wasting a winnable vote. Whatever the private motives, the public result was an alliance that could not produce its own legislators for a candidate it had jointly put up.The current council election is the next chapter of that argument, conducted where the cost is lower. Graduates’ constituencies are the slice of Bihar in which the Congress still imagines a social base of its own: urban, educated, not leased from the RJD. Putting candidates on seats the RJD had already claimed is a bid to be counted there, not a bid to bring down the government. Leaving Tirhut Teachers formally for the CPI, even as a Congress spokesman filed there as an Independent, shows the limit of the gesture.The RJD’s reply has been to stop leaving even the sitting Congress seat alone. A party reduced to 25 MLAs still appears to treat the council as its preserve. The Congress, reduced to six MLAs, has decided that accepting the leftover is more expensive than a split vote in an election that changes nothing in the legislative assembly. Both sides remain in the mahagathbandhan. The pillion arrangement frays first in the contests that do not decide power, because those are the contests in which the junior partner can afford to discover whether it still has a machine of its own.What follows October 23 will not rearrange the treasury benches, but it will fix a number both parties can use. A graduates’ or teachers’ electorate is small enough to count and urban enough for the Congress to claim as its own; if its candidates hold a visible share against RJD nominees, the party’s central leadership will have a fresh argument for the next bargain: whether a by-election, a Rajya Sabha vacancy or the seat list for a general election.If they are brushed aside, the RJD’s old case is renewed: that the Congress in Bihar is a flag without a machine, and that the March 16 absence of its MLAs was not an accident but a habit. Either result leaves the mahagathbandhan formally intact and practically thinner. The NDA, already past 200 in the assembly, needs no split vote to govern; it only needs the Opposition to keep proving—in elections that do not matter, that it cannot yet fight as one.Subscribe to India Today Magazine- Ends