NEW DELHI: Congress workers in Bihar were seen in tears on Saturday as they met the party’s state president, Rajesh Ram, who suffered a heavy defeat in Kutumba. Video from the Congress office showed distraught cadres consoling Ram, who lost the seat to HAMS candidate Lalan Ram by more than 21,000 votes. In Kutumba, the final count told the story plainly. Lalan Ram secured 84,727 votes, defeating Rajesh Ram, who managed 63,202. The Congress state president’s defeat became emblematic of a wider collapse for the party across the state, where it won only six of the 61 seats it contested, its second-worst performance in Bihar since 2010. The mood inside the party quickly turned grim, with senior leaders rushing into emergency meetings in Delhi to understand what went wrong.While the Congress and its allies blamed the outcome on what they called a compromised election process, including the hurried Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, critics dismissed their concerns. K C Venugopal said the result was “unbelievable” and claimed the Election Commission had acted in a “one-sided” and non-transparent manner. The party alleged “vote chori on a gigantic scale,” an accusation echoed by the Shiv Sena (UBT), which called the election a “scam”. The BJP and its partners, meanwhile, celebrated the sweeping mandate. Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the opposition was blaming EVMs and the Election Commission because they could not explain their defeat to their own workers. NDA leaders argued that the mandate was an endorsement of governance and the SIR, saying fake voters had finally been removed from the rolls.
