Like pollution in Delhi, Indian National Congress's continuous downfall seems insurmountable: no solution is in sight, nor is any effort being made to find a way out.
With the Bihar rout, according to one estimate being circulated on social media, Rahul Gandhi is now five short of a century of leading his party to defeat since he emerged in 2003. A chart is doing its rounds, which shows a map of India listing the state assembly polls that the Congress has lost under his tutelage. "While many will call him a 9-to-5 blame game politician, Rahul Gandhi has now accumulated 95 electoral defeats in two decades, five short of a century. Is the attack on India's institutions a diversionary tactic by the silver-silver spoon scion?", reads the introduction to the map of the Congress's debacle after debacle.
It Started In 1989
It was 1989 when the Congress lost absolute power (thereafter it formed only coalition governments). That debacle began with the Congress defeat in Tamil Nadu. The party, despite its strength of 404 in the Lok Sabha, had been struggling to stem the Bofors scandal. The victory of renegade Vishwanath Pratap Singh in the Allahabad Lok Sabha by-poll in June 1988 had been followed by other electoral setbacks. The Tamil Nadu rout was thus deemed ominous in a year when Lok Sabha elections were due.
Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi had visited Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, in the prelude to these electoral debacles. The chief editor of Navbharat Times, late Dr Rajendra Mathur, taking cue from the Hindi meaning of 'Harare', wrote an editorial: "Harare se Harare-arey, kabhi toe jitarey!" ("Defeat after defeat - win sometime!"). I wonder how Dr Mathur would have reacted to Rahul Gandhi's string of 95 reverses this time.
Rahul 'MIA'
While celebrating Bihar victory with his party workers at the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) national headquarters on Friday, Narendra Modi commented that in the six assembly polls held after the Lok Sabha election in 2014, the combined tally of the Congress was less than the number of seats won by the BJP in Bihar alone.
Rahul Gandhi's whereabouts on the day Bihar verdict was announced are not known. Neither he nor Priyanka Vadra were visible at Shanti Van in the morning when Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge, Sonia Gandhi and senior Congress leaders paid tribute to Jawaharlal Nehru on his 136th birth anniversary. In a post on X, Rahul Gandhi expressed surprise at the results and termed them "unfair". The elections were not fair from the very beginning, he asserted.
The Congress may now set up a committee to look into the reasons behind this fiasco. Or it may just feel comfortable alleging "vote chori", a pitch that does not seem to find currency among allies. Many in the Congress, too, seem unconvinced - after all, Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka and Telangana have indeed seen Congress victories.
INDIA Comes A Full Circle In Patna
It is ironic that the INDIA bloc saw its nadir in Patna. After all, it was here that the seeds of the alliance were sown when Nitish Kumar convened a meeting of 'like-minded parties' in March 2023. In that meeting, Arvind Kejriwal and his Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) had stolen the show. Despite walking out, AAP had managed to bamboozle parties now aligned under the INDIA bloc to rally around it and oppose the Delhi Services Bill (which was passed as NDA had the numbers in Parliament). The Congress's commitment to a cause with which it was not even fully convinced was such that the ailing Dr Manmohan Singh made his last-ever appearance in Parliament in a wheelchair to cast his vote for a lost battle.
However, in months, frustrated at the bloc's lack of cohesion, Nitish hitched his wagon to Modi's, and the winning combination of Bihar took roots.
The INDIA bloc exists in ether. It has no office, no coordination committee, no declared convener. The Congress assumes itself to be its fulcrum, the dismal electoral performance of the 'lead party' notwithstanding. The last meeting of the bloc was on June 4.
Rahul Gandhi's campaigns, be it caste survey, SIR (Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls) or 'vote chori', have never been discussed in any fora. Congress has not deliberated on these, and there has been no consultation with allied parties.
A Split On The Horizon?
When the Communist Party of India (Marxist)'s (CPI-M) Sitaram Yechury was alive, Rahul Gandhi was often seen sitting next to him in multi-party meetings. The same privilege has not been accorded to the current CPI(M) general secretary, M.A. Baby. Perhaps because Wayanad, the Lok Sabha seat Rahul represented in 2019 and again won in 2024, and which now is held by Priyanka Vadra, is in Kerala. MA Baby is a leading light of the Kerala unit of the CPI(M), which leads a front opposed to the Congress-led combine, in which the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) is dominant partner. During Bihar elections, all photographs of Rahul Gandhi had CPI(ML) leader Dipanker Bhattacharya standing by his side.
Perhaps due to such preferences by Rahul, PM Modi in his victory speech at BJP headquarters referred to the Congress as "MMC", for "Muslimwadi, Maowadi Congress". Modi hinted that fissures are visible within the Congress ranks and said that another split in the party may be in the offing.
The difference in the outlook of the INDIA bloc and the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) was apparent in the aftermath of the Bihar election. Senior Congress leader Tariq Anwar, who serves as the Katihar MP - he was first elected from there in 1980 and has retained the seat a few times thereafter - said that a "lack of proper coordination and joint campaigning between Congress and the RJD" was responsible for the Bihar debacle.
Where The NDA Acted Different
In contrast, PM Modi, addressing a victory function, corrected BJP workers as they chanted "Phir ek baar BJP sarkar". "Phir ek baar NDA sarkar", PM Modi declared.
A banner put up at the Janata Dal (United) (JD-U) headquarters in Patna on November 13 on the eve of the results has caught media attention. Put up by Ranjeet Sinha, it had Nitish Kumar's portrait with the legend - "Tiger abhi zinda hai" ("the Tiger is alive"). Sinha is a former Congress minister who had joined the JD(U) at its inception. He was known as the youth leader who guarded the guest house where Indira Gandhi stayed when she visited Patna to meet Jayprakash Narain during Janata government days and also on the eve of her historic visit to Belchi.
The Fault Lines Are Showing
With the workers with the "Tiger" spirit having left Congress one by one, the party now finds itself in a state wherein its strength in the assemblies of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar is in single digits. Rahul Gandhi is the Leader of the Opposition by virtue of the Congress's strength of 99 in the Lok Sabha. It's another story how since 2014, a triple-digit tally has eluded it. Word is that the INDIA bloc parties are not comfortable with Gandhi's ways and have disassociated from his antics several times. Supriya Sule of the Sharad Pawar-led Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) has broken ranks and joined the Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) on bills proposing to remove top government functionaries under arrest for 30 days. The Trinamool Congress, the Samajwadi Party, AAP, the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena, all of whom have 77 seats between themselves, are often seen acting in tandem, not in sync with LoP Rahul Gandhi.
(The author is a senior journalist and former editor)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
