Bihar Cong gasping for breath

14 Congress MLAs out of 27 have reportedly formed an informal group and they are on the verge of joining Chief Minister Nitish Kumar's JD(U). CM Nitish Kumar has recently dismantled the ruling Mahagatbandhan of JD(U), RJD and Congress and aligned with BJP to form the government. After the fall of Mahagatbandhan govt., the pressure appeared to have been built on some Congress MLAs by Upper caste voters to go with Nitish Kumar. CM Nitish Kumar ditched the Mahagathbandhan and formed Govt. with BJP. As far as the Congress party is concerned, it had got an opportunity to be in power after it was thrown out of it in 1990. It is also after 27 years that it appeared that Congress could revive when it won 27 seats in the assembly out of 40 for which it had fought. When Congress leadership got a hint of the development about forming an informal group of 14 party MLAs, party President Sonia Gandhi acted promptly by asking state party president Ashok Chaudhary and the leader in assembly Sadanand Singh to come to Delhi to brief her. Mrs. Gandhi has rightly asked Chaudhary and Singh to take immediate measures to stop a split in the party. The Congress has 27 MLAs and six MLCs in Bihar. Of them, four — Ashok Choudhary, Madan Mohan Jha (both MLCs), Abdul Jalil Mastan and Awadesh Kumar Singh (both MLAs) — were ministers in the grand alliance government. A few other senior MLAs were hopeful of being accommodated in state boards and corporations before CM Nitish Kumar broke away from RJD and Congress to reunite with BJP. If the Congress splits at this juncture, there will be a great loss for the party. But it would strengthen CM Nitish Kumar in the assembly. Congress charges Nitish Kumar of engineering a split in the party to emerge stronger. It is natural that if 14 Congress MLAs joined JD(U), its strength in the assembly would go up. But it is the anti-defection law that prevents the 14 Congress MLAs from resigning from the party. So, they may be trying to cause a vertical split in the party to form a separate group. Mrs. Gandhi has swung into action and stopped a split in Bihar party unit for the time being. The base of the Congress has shrunk in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh considerably. These are the two biggest and politically most important states. And it is because of this that Congress is getting weaker and weaker election by election there. Without a strong base, a national party like Congress, which is also the oldest one, cannot rule the country. The main cause behind this deplorable and precarious condition of Congress is its weak organization from village to the state capital level. There is also a dearth of new and promising leaders in these two states. The old leaders in these two states have lost their connectivities with the people on the ground level. The time has gone when politics was done from the air-conditioned rooms in Delhi. Today, if you are in politics, you have to be on the ground to share people's problems. Still, there are at least some congress men in every village in India. But in the absence organizational support, the party men are vanishing very fast. So, the leadership of the Congress party first overhauls the entire organizational set-up in these two states from village to state capital level. Congress leadership must handover the charge of the Bihar state party units at all levels to the leaders, who are young, honest, and energetic and have ideologically unflinching loyalty to the leadership to take it out of a mess, morose and moribund condition.