Earlier this month, March 14 to be precise, Sonia Gandhi completed 17 years as president of the 130-year-old Congress party. When she took over the reins of the party on that day in 1998, Congress had been out of power for two years, its popularity was fast waning and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was in a resurgence mode.
Today the Congress finds itself in a similar situation — in fact, much worse. What the Congress is facing today is nothing short of an existential crisis. After being reduced to a never-before tally of just 44 seats in the 543-member Lok Sabha, the Congress has been pulped in assembly elections in five states.
The last defeat for the Congress in Delhi assembly was the cruelest cut of all as for the first time ever the party failed to even its account in the 70-member assembly and its vote share shrank from 25 per cent in the general elections to a mere 9.7 per cent.
Worse, Rahul Gandhi, Sonia’s son, failed to live up to his party’s expectations. Voters of India rejected the young Congress leader and embraced Modi. Voters of five states too handed out the same verdict to Rahul.
The Delhi debacle finally took its toll on Rahul as he took “leave of absence” in the third week of February just ahead of budget session of Parliament and vanished to an undisclosed destination to mull over his political career. A month later Rahul is yet to come out of his political hibernation.
In the meanwhile, the popularity graph of the BJP’s poster boy and Prime Minister Narendra Modi too started dipping. The Modi government traveled from one crisis to another, one embarrassment to another. Defeat in Delhi assembly polls at the hands of barely three-year-old Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) was the rudest shock for Modi’s BJP.
This presented the opposition with a whale of an opportunity to take on Modi and the BJP. But there was dire vacuum in the opposition. Rahul was still away and Sonia had retreated into a shell for last 10 months.
Then suddenly Sonia Gandhi surprised everybody and like a wounded tigress launched an audacious frontal attack on the Modi government in and outside Parliament last week.
All this happened when Rahul Gandhi continued to be absent. Sonia made good for her son’s absence. This was her way of telling the party cadres that the Gandhi family was still a beacon of hope not only for the entire opposition but also readying itself to take on Modi and the BJP in a more resolute manner all over the nation, elections or no elections. This is the second coming of Sonia Gandhi. Significantly, it comes at a time when no elections are round the corner for at least six or seven months.
But electoral victory is to a political party what scoring well is for a cricketer. No party can survive for long without winning elections.
It is here that the Congress predicament is threatening to be worrisome all the more. Here is how. The next major electoral battle is set to explode on the Indian political scene in October-November this year when the crucial state of Bihar goes for assembly polls.
The problem for the Congress is that even if presuming for argument sake that the opposition would win Bihar polls, the Congress is likely to remain a peripheral force. Congress will only be a junior partner of an anti-Modi alliance of regional parties like Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United) and Lalu Prasad Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal.
Five years ago, the JD (U) had contested 141 seats and won 115, while the RJD had won only 22 seats after contesting from 168 constituencies. JD (U) and RJD would likely contest the Bihar polls together and would inevitably put up candidates in about 200 of the total 243 assembly seats.
This would leave crumbs for the Congress. In any case, going by the 2010 seats tally the Congress will have to make do with whatever 30-40 seats are offered to it by the regional parties as the Congress had won just four seats last time. That is why it is the worst existential crisis for the Congress. Even the second coming of Sonia Gandhi is unlikely to redeem the party anytime soon.
