Was 2024 LS Polls Cong's dead cat bounce 2.0?

The Bihar election results have triggered an existential crisis of sorts for the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), which has sunk close to its worst ever performance in the state in 2010 despite having a much wider coalition and vote share in the state.

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However, the Bihar results also merit revisiting an older and bigger question in Indian politics: the state of its oldest political party, namely the Indian National Congress. What is happening to the Congress after the 2024 Lok Sabha elections can only be described as the general election results last year having been the second version of the proverbial dead cat bounce for the party. It is a party which is still the only national contender to the BJP but getting further and further away from being an effective challenger to the BJP.

2024, like 2009, seemed like a reversal of the Congress's long-term decline

The usual schematic on Indian politics divides post-independent polity into four eras: Congress dominance or the First Party System when Congress dominated both the centre and the states (1952-67), Congress holding on to the centre but losing ground in states or the second party system (1967-1989), dawn of coalition politics (1989-2014) and the era of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) dominance which has now been termed as the fourth party system (2014 onwards).