As Rahul Gandhi and Tejashwi Yadav’s Voter Adhikar Yatra in Bihar wound to a close on September 1 after traversing 1,300-odd km, 25 districts and some 110 assembly constituencies within a fortnight, the Congress found itself with some rare cause for optimism.
For the first time in decades, Congress flags-fluttering alongside those of the RJD (Rashtriya Janata Dal)-commanded genuine attention at a gathering, with INDIA bloc allies turning up in conspicuous solidarity. Even the Trinamool Congress (TMC), while wary of appearing too cosy with the Congress or the Left in the run-up to the West Bengal elections in 2026, sent its MP Yusuf Pathan to attend.
At the frontlines stood Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) chief Hemant Soren, Sanjay Raut of the Shiv Sena (UBT), and mahagathbandhan partners Mukesh Sahni of the Vikassheel Insaan Party (VIP) and Dipankar Bhattacharya of the CPI (M-L) Liberation.
Earlier, in different stretches of the march, came cameo appearances from Tamil Nadu chief minister M.K. Stalin (Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam), Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav, Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra and her party’s Telangana chief minister A. Revanth Reddy-all indicators of the INDIA bloc’s increasingly coordinated strategy for the Bihar polls this year.
Rahul brought down the curtain on the yatra with a speech heavy on symbolism. He unfurled his now-familiar slogan, ‘Vote chor, gaddi chhor’ (Vote thief, give up the chair), before warning Bihar’s young that ballot theft meant more than losing a vote: it meant losing rights, reservations, jobs and education.
Rahul accused the very forces that had felled Mahatma Gandhi of now conspiring to destroy the Constitution. And in response to those waving black flags, he offered an incendiary metaphor: if Karnataka’s revelations on ‘fraudulent rolls’ were an “atom bomb”, the “hydrogen bomb” to come, he promised, would be far more explosive.
Kharge matched that aggression while Tejashwi sharpened his attack on the Nitish Kumar government for ‘aping’ RJD schemes-according to him, a welfare grant of Rs 1,500 copied at Rs 1,100; his promise of 200 megawatts of free power mirrored but cut down to 125 units; a Rs 10,000 aid package for women entrepreneurs too.
Tejashwi, invoking father Lalu Yadav’s charge against BJP icon L.K. Advani’s 1990 Rath Yatra, cast himself as heir to a revolutionary tradition. “Bihar is the seat of the Republic. Two people from Gujarat are trying to murder democracy, but the people of Bihar see through the ruse,” he said, calling the ‘double engine’ governance of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) dysfunctional.
Beyond the rhetoric, the Voter Adhikar Yatra seemed to have worked a subtler alchemy. It galvanised the Congress rank and file in Bihar-cadre long adrift suddenly infused with the confidence that their long-delayed reawakening might have just arrived.
Analysts, from the newsroom to the roadside, were quick to take stock. The Congress in Bihar had long resembled a gracious but decaying mansion, crumbling since Lalu’s ascendancy in the 1990s. Even in the 2020 polls, when a Tejashwi-led RJD had emerged as the single-largest party, the Congress dragged the alliance down with a meagre haul of 19 seats. In 2024, the Congress won three of the nine Lok Sabha seats it contested, a modest rebound at best. Its vote share-barely scraping 10 per cent-spoke more of survival than any resurgence.
Now, the Voter Adhikar Yatra has arguably given the Congress what it has lacked for a generation: visibility, legitimacy and relevance. It was seen less as a spectacle and more as a form of meditation-walkathon politics turning strangers into supporters. In Sultanganj, in Bhagalpur district, the symbolism was striking: in a Yadav-dominated zone, Congress flags outnumbered the RJD’s and local leader Lalan Kumar, the party’s candidate in the 2020 polls from Sultanganj, perched atop a JCB machine, showered flowers on Rahul. Across the state, women, young men and elderly farmers gathered-perhaps in hope of a reprieve from political disenfranchisement.
The result was undeniable: a spike in morale, a leadership suddenly luminous within the INDIA bloc, and a Congress that, for the first time in three decades, looked like it might claim some genuine presence in Bihar’s rural heartland.
But revival isn’t redemption. The Congress remains, structurally and psychologically, the junior partner in Bihar’s coalition theatre, dependent on the RJD’s caste reservoirs and vulnerable to perceptions of subordination. For many voters, the party is still an adjunct rather than a protagonist. OBCs and EBCs, though not hostile, remain sceptical; the upper-caste vote-bank, long ago captured by the BJP, is unlikely to return. The problems of internal discord, seat-sharing arithmetic and organisational atrophy await resolution.
Yet, walking those 1,300-odd km in a fortnight, Rahul did more than rehearse slogans. He planted the Congress back in the electoral frame. He claimed a narrative, staked moral ground and may have even earned some bargaining power. When seat-sharing talks in the INDIA bloc start, this boost may translate into actual seats for his party. In Bihar, where governments have been unmade by wafer-thin margins, even a modest flicker of revival could alter the script.
The Voter Adhikar Yatra was never merely a campaign; it was an overture. The symphony that follows-whether it crescendos into revival or fades into silence-will depend not only on Bihar’s electorate but on whether the Congress has finally learnt how to walk the long road back from political marginalisation in the state.