What's Wrong With The Congress, And What It Needs To Do

The Congress’s impressive Telangana victory in this election cycle has been completely overshadowed by its losses in the states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. The results have strengthened the BJP’s position ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. The Congress and its ideological fellow-travellers must answer some questions before they get back to the 2024 campaign.

- Roshan Kishore

TERMS OF TRADE - ELECTION ANALYSIS

A segment of the Congress leadership and the left-liberal commentariat continues to insist that democracy in India is increasingly coming under a squeeze. While one can always debate about what the ideal state of democracy is and whether it ever existed in India, the state of purely transactional electoral democracy seems to be absolutely fine even from the Congress’s perspective. It has won the state of Telangana in this election cycle, and even though it has lost Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, its vote share – the best measure of popular support in an electoral democracy – in these three states is actually higher than what it is in Telangana. The Congress’s problem is that the BJP’s popular support is much higher than that its own in the states it has lost. Even before these elections, the Congress has been able to defeat the BJP in other state elections. Where the Congress party has failed completely in the post-2014 period is to get its own state governments re-elected.

That’s anything but a sign of weak democracy.

The Congress party’s top leadership, especially Rahul Gandhi, seems to have reached a conclusion that the best way to revive the party’s fortunes in 2024 is to resurrect Mandal politics (read: other backward classes consolidation). The only state where the Congress has won in this election cycle is where it had fought the polls with a dominant caste (Reddy) face, whereas it has lost power in Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh where its incumbent chief ministers were OBCs.