Lalu Yadav On "Strategic Blunder" By Regional Parties This Election

Rahul Gandhi's offer to resign as Congress president is suicidal and will amount to falling into the BJP's trap, jailed Bihar politician Lalu Yadav has said in an article that he tweeted Tuesday morning.

"Rahul's offer to resign is suicidal. Opposition parties had the common goal to dislodge BJP but failed to build a national narrative. The result in a particular election can never alter the reality in as diverse and plural a country as India," said Lalu Yadav, the chief of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), which, along with the Congress, was routed in Bihar in the national election.

"The moment someone else beyond the Gandhi-Nehru family replaces Rahul, the Narendra Modi-Amit Shah brigade will paint the new leader as a "puppet" remote-controlled by Rahul and Sonia Gandhi. This will play on it till the next general election. Why should Rahul give such an opportunity to his political detractors," Lalu Yadav says in an article in The Telegraph.

The RJD chief, who has been at a government hospital in Ranchi since he was jailed in fodder scam cases in 2017, has reportedly been deeply disturbed over his party's defeat in Bihar and Jharkhand.

In 40-seat Bihar, opposition alliance won a single seat (the Congress won in Kishanganj) while the RJD scored a duck. The Janata Dal United-BJP coalition won 39 seats.

Lalu Yadav said the fact was that the opposition had lost the election against the BJP and should accept it as their collective failure.

"In this election, the BJP had (Narendra) Modi as the undisputed leader. But the Opposition parties didn't have a consensus on one leader as the dulha of their baraat (groom of their wedding party). Moreover, Modi - a demagogue - found the playground bereft of the main strike bowler in a state like Bihar and just got a walkover," Lalu Yadav said.

Lalu Yadav said that the opposition should have collectively projected Rahul Gandhi as its prime ministerial candidate. "There was nothing wrong in regional parties bargaining for more seats, but they should not have made the strategic blunder of not projecting someone without a national perspective as their prime ministerial candidate," he said.