The collapse of the mahagathbandhan, the grand opposition alliance, in the Bihar Assembly elections on Friday (November 14, 2025) has prompted Congress officials to blame alleged “vote theft” and the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in the state. The Congress itself is set to record its worst number of seats in the state since 2010.
Bihar Assembly Election Results 2025 | Live updates
In X’s post, Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi said the election was unfair. “This result in Bihar is truly surprising. We could not have achieved victory in an election that was not fair from the very beginning. This fight is for the protection of the constitution and democracy. Congress party and INDIA alliance will review this result deeply and make their efforts to save democracy even more effective,” he said.
Stunned into silence by the debacle, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge said late on Friday (November 14) that the party would conduct a “thorough study of the election results and present a detailed perspective after understanding the reasons behind the results”.
Former Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot, who has emerged as a troubleshooter for the opposition alliance during seat-sharing talks, has accused the Election Commission of India (ECI) of “collaborating” with the ruling coalition in Bihar.
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Mr Gehlot alleged that pension payments and cash transfers, including ₹10,000 for women under the Mukhyamantri Mahila Rozgar Yojana, continued unabated despite the Model Code of Conduct (MCC) being in place.
“ECI’s deal with NDA”
“The assembly results are disappointing. It seems to me that the ₹10,000 payment to women continued even as the election campaign was going on; such a thing will never happen,” he said in Jaipur, recalling how during the 2023 Rajasthan Assembly elections, the distribution of mobile phones to women under the welfare scheme and pension payments were stopped once the MCC ended.
He noted that the distribution of smartphones has been stopped in Rajasthan even though 30% of the beneficiaries have already received their devices. Even ongoing social security pensions and schemes like Annapurna have been stopped, the Congress leader added. He alleged that the NDA government in Bihar followed the same model as in Maharashtra where ₹7,500 was given to the beneficiaries.
“In Bihar, the Election Commission remained a mute spectator. Why didn’t they stop it? They didn’t intervene at all. When you don’t ensure fair elections, when there is booth occupation or dishonesty, and the Election Commission doesn’t take any action, it’s vote theft. There was a clear deal with the ruling party,” Gehlot said.
“Tilted Pitch”
His party colleague and Lok Sabha member from Tamil Nadu, Manickam Tagore, blamed the SIR exercise for the defeat.
“When you wipe out 65 million voters – mostly opposition voters – what do you expect on the day of results? Democracy cannot survive if the playing field is tilted before the contest even begins,” Mr Tagore said in X’s post with the hashtag #VoteChori.
Although Congress leader Rahul Gandhi is yet to comment on Friday’s poll results, he had earlier claimed at a press conference that the same pattern would follow in Bihar as vote-stealing “has now been industrialised”.
Complete decimation
However, no allegation can take away the reality of Congress’ worst performance in the last three House elections: out of 27 seats in 2015 and 19 seats in 2020, the party was leading by only six seats at the time of filing this report.
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The party’s hopes of building momentum for the mahagathbandhan, riding on the popularity of Mr Gandhi’s voter Adhikar Yatra, which covered 1,300 km across 25 districts in August, have been dashed. The Congress lost most of the seats that fell along the yatra route and the defeat of Bihar Congress chief Rajesh Kumar made the party’s decimation complete.
“Expel those responsible”
The crushing defeat in Bihar will not only affect the morale of Congress workers in Assam and Kerala, where the party is the main challenger in the next assembly polls, but is also likely to change the dynamics of the INDIA bloc.
Veteran Congress leader from Bihar Kishore Kumar Jha complained about ticket distribution and party strategy and demanded an inquiry into the party debacle. “Rahul ji should set up a committee to find out who was responsible for the defeat and expel them from the party,” Mr Jha said.
In X’s post, Mumtaz Patel, daughter of the late Ahmed Patel, who served as political secretary to former Congress president Sonia Gandhi, said the party’s repeated failures were due to “power concentrated in the hands of a few who are completely disconnected from the ground reality”.
Published – 14 Nov 2025 21:30 IST
