Congress' Vote Share Mostly Built Around an Anti-BJP Lobby is Just Not Enough

This is hardly backed by those who are imagining an alternative because there is nothing to see.

The NDA’s landslide victory in Maharashtra points to a worrying direction for India’s principal opposition party. The Congress-led alliance was routed in India's richest state and humiliated in the Rajasthan bypolls as well. Its only consolation was winning 3:0 in the Karnataka bypolls, given that it played a junior role in the INDIA bloc's victory in Jharkhand.

This author has previously written about how the Congress party and its central leadership, particularly the Gandhis, need to acknowledge and learn from their past mistakes as they continue to lose electoral credibility, especially after an unexpected defeat in Haryana a month ago.

Regional political anchors like AAP and TMC are now distancing themselves from the INDIA bloc and the Congress, leaving the national opposition fragmented and demoralised.

In reflection, one can recognise this as part of an endemic crisis of the "3Ds" applicable to the grand old party’s political status quo and performative regression: a crisis of delusion, a crisis of distraction, and a crisis shaped by a lack of direction.  

A crisis of delusion has a lot to do with the party’s own internal state and vision. Misplaced entitlement and dynastic privilege amongst certain leaders make function live in a bubble. Before any election, they are often waiting for a strong enough anti-BJP or anti-Modi wave to improve the party’s own chances.

Even on an issue as important as EVMs, i.e., the gap observed in polled vs counted votes, and on the serious nature of issues emerging from the Haryana election’s vote count in certain constituencies (similar to previous such instances reported in UP, now in Maharashtra), there was no major movement by the Opposition that ended up capturing the people’s imagination.

Political leaders can write op-eds or tweet about it all they like, but ultimately, there needs to a sustained effort to reach out to those facing socio-economic hardships.

On that note, a crisis of distraction, from not acknowledging core political and economic issues and preparing a coherent electoral agenda from it, has afflicted the Congress party’s leadership and strategy-making apparatus for quite some time now.

While the BJP in Maharashtra, reduced to nine seats in the Lok Sabha elections, started preparing for the assembly elections immediately after, the Congress and the MVA took their time on every relevant decision.  

The alliance failed to present a united effort with a common CM face, which is difficult to understand since it was created back in 2019 with Uddhav Thackeray as the face. The NDA, on the other hand, kept strong local leadership in unison under both Fadnavis and Shinde.

In leadership and managerial strategy, the Congress seems clueless without a leader who has strong electoral footprints and strategy-building capabilities.

Unfortunately, under Gandhi’s surficial, orbital leadership, where he failed to take on the role of the party president, but somehow still remains the main face and decision-making force, he has not been able to sufficiently carve a space out for new, young leaders to dynamically win elections for the party.

Older, senior leaders, who are put in charge of state-wide election campaigns continue to fail in their assigned roles without being benched, nor do they face any consequences from the party high command (in Maharashtra’s context it was Bhupesh Baghel and Ashok Gehlot who were overseeing and leading the charge for the party’s operations).  

The third aspect of the party's crisis is a lack of direction which has to do with its core socio-economic agenda (as argued earlier here).  

The empowerment-focused approach in safeguarding upward mobility is critical in shaping an alternative imagination of an electorate that feeds on new information from social media and revises its choice in a consumerist manner.  

When it comes to winning elections, the digital narrative is as important as the local narrative, along with a booth-level strategy for influencing core voter groups (mapping their needs with announced interventions). Its two attempted master narratives, one on caste and the other on farmers, are not enough to consolidate an electoral strategy

The Gandhis need to recognise these pitfalls. Their overt emphasis on singular issues (caste, class) without connecting them to complex, local dynamics and with the aspirational class of a rapidly changing electorate (whose needs and preferences are nowhere close to what they were a decade back) needs careful assessment.  

The Congress leadership has to also ponder whether merely banking on the distribution of constrained state resources, like public sector jobs or reconfiguring reservations, will create the kind of coalitions it needs (especially from regional allies).

For now, what we see is a Congress vote-share built around an anti-BJP lobby, hardly backed by those who are imagining an alternative because there is nothing to see.

(Deepanshu Mohan is a Professor of Economics, Dean, IDEAS, Office of Inter-Disciplinary Studies, and Director of Centre for New Economics Studies (CNES), OP Jindal Global University. He is a Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics, and a 2024 Fall Academic Visitor to the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford. This is an opinion article and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)