WHY INDIA CANNOT DO WITHOUT CONGRESS

THE post-mortems continue to be written after last weekend's election results, mostly dismissing the Congress's prospects in the forthcoming general elections and announcing that it is finished in the Hindi belt.

- SHASHI THAROOR

Its historically poorest performance in 2014, followed by a comparable failure in 2019 and now the recent losses in four states in all of which it expected, and was expected to, fare much better-has convinced commentators that the Grand Old Party is facing its biggest crisis ever. 'Congress-mukt Bharat' was one of Modi's election slogans during the 2014 Lok Sabha campaign. Is he about to realise that goal in 2024? I am tempted to say: not so fast, friends.

This is not said out of complacency, the very attribute many are ascribing to us to account for our defeat even in states where we were said to be well ahead. Later this month, on December 28, the party celebrates its 139th foundation day. I am well aware that many formerly formidable national parties like the Whigs in the United States or the Liberals in the UK have faded into irrelevance or even extinction after once being seen as "natural parties of government".

Our own relatively shorter democratic history has witnessed the disappearance of once-formidable national parties-Rajaji's Swatantra Party, once India's largest opposition party, which had as many seats in the Lok Sabha after the 1967 elections as the Congress had in 2014; the Communist Party of India, which has now dwindled to a marginal appendage of its breakaway faction, the CPI(M); and the Janata Party, which ruled India from 1977 to 1979.

The Congress won't disappear like Janata or merge into another party like Swatantra, but it is already reduced to being the third or fourth party in several states where it had earlier been either the ruling party or the principal opposition. This is why some write the Congress off as a once-formidable force that lingers on as little more than a shadow of its own storied history.