Shifting Sands: Assimilation to Self Adoration

The BJP appears to be making the same mistake as the Congress: the centralisation of power. History will tell us which of the two will learn its lessons faster or if there will be another twist

- K M CHANDRASEKHAR

The political situation underwent another churn when the Delhi election results were declared last week. Since 2014, the BJP has been on the ascendant. Their movement up and up seemed arrested in 2024 when they lost their majority in the Lok Sabha, and they had to form a government with the support of other parties. The Congress celebrated this event as a great victory, a harbinger of many more victories in the future. Their defeat in Maharashtra and Haryana took some wind out of their sails.

Their reaction to the election in Delhi is unclear. Their vote share is only 6 percent, but they seem overjoyed at the defeat of their ally, the AAP. Earlier, they had fought tooth and nail against another ally in the rapidly vanishing INDIA bloc, the TMC in West Bengal, and lost comprehensively. The party's strategy appears confusing, to say the least: is it to challenge the dominant BJP or to finish off the regional parties and clear the decks for the BJP? Has it given up hopes of challenging the BJP? Or is it living in a fool's paradise?

The evolution of the Congress is fascinating in this context. Praveen Rai and Sanjay Kumar, in an article in the Economic and Political Weekly, noticed three distinct phases in this evolution: the period of Congress dominance from 1952 to 1968, the Indira-Rajiv era from 1968 to 1991, and the Sonia-Rahul era from 1998 onwards.