Mahagathbandhan crash: From 16 seats in 2020 to single digits now- the Left's steep decline

NEW DELHI: The Mahagathbandhan stands dismantled in Bihar — and its constituent parties have fared no better on their own. While the two larger players, the RJD in Bihar and the Congress at the national level, will regroup and continue the fight, the real setback has been for the three Left parties.

In 2020, they delivered an impressive 16 seats to the alliance’s tally of 110. This time, however, they could not even reach double digits collectively. The scale of this decline raises a deeper question: where does the Left go from here?


The decline

Five years ago, it was the Congress that denied RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav a shot at the chief minister’s post. While the grand old party won 19 of the 70 seats it contested, the Left parties performed far better, fielding 29 candidates and winning 16.

The CPI(ML) Liberation had delivered the strongest showing, with 12 wins from 19 seats — a strike rate of 63 per cent. The CPI and CPI(M) added two seats each, contesting six and four constituencies, respectively.

This time, however, the picture is starkly different. With counting in its final stages, the CPI(ML) Liberation has won only two seats and the CPI(M) just one — neither is leading anywhere else. The CPI, meanwhile, has been wiped out entirely.

The drop in vote share, however, is marginal. The Left front has slipped only slightly — from 4.64 per cent in 2020 to 4.18 per cent this time (with counting still underway).

What went wrong?

The election effectively became a referendum on the 20-year tenure of Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar — and the JD(U) chief passed with flying colours. Powered significantly by his core support base of women voters — whose turnout across both phases was nearly nine percentage points higher than that of men — the NDA delivered a performance reminiscent of its sweeping 2010 victory.

The Mahagathbandhan’s collapse was also fuelled by its own disunity. With each constituent staking claims to a larger share of seats, the alliance never finalised a formal seat-sharing pact. The CPI(M) and CPI together sought 35 seats — 24 and 11, respectively — six more than what the three Left parties had contested collectively in 2020. Ultimately, the Left fielded 33 candidates: 20 from CPI(ML) Liberation, nine from CPI and four from CPI(M).

Despite fighting under a common banner and projecting Tejashwi Yadav as their chief ministerial face, the partners never achieved real coherence on the ground — and each paid the price.

What next for Left?
Having already lost its traditional strongholds of West Bengal (2011) and Tripura (2018) — states it had governed for decades — the Left Front now remains in power only in Kerala. There too, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, who made history by leading the Left Democratic Front (LDF) to re-election in 2021 and breaking the state’s pattern of alternating governments, will have completed a decade in office by the time Kerala votes again in 2026.

Ironically, the Left’s main challenger in Kerala will be its current ally in Bihar — the Congress, which heads the opposition United Democratic Front (UDF) in the southern state.

Select The Times of India as your preferred source on Google Search