How sidelining its workers may cost Congress in the Bihar elections

New Delhi: Bihar’s election has exposed a problem that the Congress should have fixed long ago: the party’s words about honouring its workers do not match the way decisions are actually made. 

When the leadership speaks of “respectable shares” in an alliance and then accepts fewer than 60 seats, it does more than trim ambition; it sends a message to the cadre that their effort on the ground can be traded away at the negotiating table. 

A smaller footprint narrows the conversation in every constituency, and the first casualty is morale. The candidate selection process deepened that damage. 

Instead of becoming a moment to energise workers and bring local intelligence to the fore, it turned opaque and needlessly complicated. 

Seats were finalised and nominees were chosen behind closed doors, while a “survey”, which was never explained and never defended in public, became a convenient justification to install favourites. 

If data truly guided the choices, the criteria and timelines should have been published in advance. Without that transparency, every decision looks like a favour, and every omission looks like a slight.

Rival parties named candidates early and pushed them straight into the field; many Congress aspirants, by contrast, were still shuttling between Patna and Delhi awaiting approvals. 

Ticket distribution reportedly happened at private venues rather than at the party office, and final lists were neither promptly posted nor openly defended. 

A campaign that begins in secrecy does not inspire confidence in the booth worker who has to defend it at the tea stall the next morning.

Late tickets mean late voter outreach, fewer rounds in the constituency, and a compressed time window to stitch together the social coalition that actually wins seats in Bihar. 

Confused lines of authority slow routine campaign work, resource allocation, booth agent training, WhatsApp coordination, roadshow permissions, and force workers to waste days seeking signatures and clearances. 

When the system appears to reward proximity rather than performance, the best organisers retreat from the frontline, and the party enters polling week with a weaker physical and digital presence than it could have commanded.

Workers who have spent months tending to visiting leaders and managing logistics expected, at minimum, clarity and respect when the symbol was granted. 
What they saw instead was a process that privileged a handful of power centres and sidelined district committees that understand their ground. 

The corrective measures are not radical and does not require a different ideology; it requires discipline, openness, and a public commitment to fair process. 

The party can start by laying out clear, verifiable criteria for nominations, past organisational work, local credibility, booth strength, coalition arithmetic, and measurable winnability indicators, and by stating, in writing, how those criteria are weighted. 

It should restore a meaningful role for district and block bodies in screening names, publish a calendar for announcements, and stick to it. If a survey informed choices, the methodology can be summarised and the broad findings shared; sunlight will not weaken a strong case.

Running the war room from the state office, taking questions from workers, and issuing daily targets do more than tidy the optics; the state and central leadership convert frustration into action. Equally important is the formality of the ticket itself. The symbol is not a slip of paper; it is a public pledge between organisation and nominee. It should be handed over in the open, on record, with the team that will help carry the campaign standing alongside.

Finally, the party must speak to its workers with honesty and with proof of support. An acknowledgement of mistakes, followed by concrete help, booth kits, local media budgets, templated creatives in local languages, and clear escalation channels, will do more to revive energy than any speech. When a worker feels seen and equipped, he or she returns to the field and takes ten more along.

Elections in Bihar reward clarity, predictability, and courage under pressure. The Congress cannot control its allies’ ambitions or its opponents’ narratives, but it can control the way it chooses candidates, the way it communicates decisions, and the way it treats the people who stand under its flag. 

If the high command moves quickly to restore transparency, decentralise the last mile, and put its leadership squarely in front of the cadre, the party can still salvage momentum in this cycle. If it does not, the verdict will be harsh and, more importantly, lasting, not for what rivals did to the Congress, but for what the Congress did to itself.