The spectacular momentum achieved by India’s secular forces in October-November last year against Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s divisive government has now come to a screeching halt. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has turned the tables on the Sonia Gandhi-led Congress Party by wresting Assam from it. This is the first time that the BJP will be forming a government in the northeastern state.

In Kerala, too, the Congress has lost power. The defeat in Kerala is not particularly stinging because the party has lost to the leftists, who are secular to the core and diehard opponents of the BJP. Also, Kerala is known for voting out incumbents every five years throughout its electoral history.

In Tamil Nadu, the Congress went with M. Karunanidhi’s Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK). There J. Jayalalitha’s All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) emerged victorious. In West Bengal, the Congress allied its fortunes with the leftists, but Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress (TMC) scored a massive victory.

After its colossal losses on Thursday, the Congress is left with power in only six of India’s 29 states. It would have been down to five had the Supreme Court not intervened in Uttarakhand recently.

On the other side of the political divide, the BJP is ruling in nine states and is sharing power in four states. Despite a massive nationwide uproar against Modi and his party’s divisive agenda, nothing seems to be going right for the Congress. Elections are due in Punjab soon and the party is not in the reckoning there. Opinion polls are giving advantage to Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) against the Akali Dal-BJP ruling combine.



Next year, India’s most politically crucial state, Uttar Pradesh, will go to the polls. And there, too, the Congress is not the main party. The contest will be among the ruling Samajwadi Party, BJP and Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party.

Why is the country’s oldest party in such a terminal decline? Is this the end of the road for the Congress? Can Rahul Gandhi deliver? Those are the questions that were uppermost in the minds of secular Indians on Thursday as the results from the five states came pouring in. There are no clear answers to any of those questions.

Widely described as the natural party of governance, the Congress has not been able to reimagine and recast itself. While Rahul Gandhi has been able to capture the popular imagination with his hard-hitting jibes against the Modi government, his party has not been able to translate that into votes. More important, it has not been able to stitch political alliances the way Modi’s BJP has done.

The BJP has done the unthinkable by partnering with Mehbooba Mufti’s People’s Democratic Party (PDP) in Jammu and Kashmir. In Assam, it went with Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) and reaped rich political dividends. Despite deep problems, the party has continued its alliance with the volatile Shiv Sena in Maharashtra.

Call it political opportunism or whatever, the BJP has outdone the Congress in terms of creating winnable coalitions. In the past, this was the hallmark of the Congress. In 2004, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee was confident of winning a second term when Sonia Gandhi quietly and single-handedly pulled the rug from under his feet by crisscrossing the country and stitching alliances with regional parties.

The party should adopt that strategy and bring all secular forces together. The lesson from Assam is very clear. The party, under Tarun Gogoi, refused to go into an alliance with like-minded secular parties. The Congress Party should have taken Maulana Badruddin Ajmal’s All-India United Democratic Front (AIUDF) on board. That cost both the parties dear.

For Indian Muslim parties, the results have been particularly bad. The AIUDF was badly bruised in Assam and the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML), which was sharing power with the Congress in Kerala with five ministers, suffered losses, including in its bastions of Thanoor and Koduvally. The party’s margin of victory in many seats has come down considerably, indicating a possible loss of vote share.

The Congress should bite the bullet and not shy away from playing second fiddle to regional parties. The party should help coalesce all secular parties and secular leaders under one umbrella to take on the might of Modi. The best time to do that is now — in the run-up to Uttar Pradesh assembly elections in 2017. Mayawati has given enough indications of her opposition to the BJP when her party MLAs voted for the Congress Party’s Harish Rawat during the vote of confidence in Uttarakhand recently.

After all’s said and done, one thing remains crystal clear, that despite its shrinking footprint, the Congress remains the only pan-India party. Any national-level secular front will have to be built with it at the core.

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