by Dr. Jyoti and Rishi Kumar 2 October 2023
The Indian National Congress (INC) is no longer in a position to set the terms of political competition or set the agenda. Its relation with many social sections and various regional parties has been tenuous. Its prospect of retaining power is only contingent. Overall this condition has been understood as the characteristic of post-congress politics, a condition in which the INC was no more the central poll of party competition against which all other political parties, termed as non-congress opposition, are arrayed on either side. During the mid-way 1990s, the decline of the INC appeared to be arrested. It came back to power in 2004, leading the UPA and in 2009 significantly added to its seat share in the Lok Sabha. This later development allowed the party to retain its role in the politics of the country as the prominent one among the important players and to prevent it from fading away but it failed.
Once we moved beyond the Parliamentary elections of 2004 and 2009, the picture in the different states of India presents a much more complex story of electoral politics. The volatility of electoral support has come down, at the national level and in many states, as the parties were able to consolidate the electoral support bases over the years (Palishkar, Suri, Yadav 2014). This development has affected both the party system and the election outcomes. Numerous journalistic and scholarly narratives highlighted the Congress party’s collapse in the nation’s political arena, and alarms were raised inside the party circles to halt its ultimate decline and prevent it from being sidelined. The party got together, but internal strife and a lack of innovative initiatives did not help it turn around its electoral fortunes. It rapidly lost the state elections held in 2015-2016 and gave the BJP, which was in a strong position, the remaining political ground. The declining wheel turned a full circle and the Congress is in power now in only four states- Karnataka, Chhatisgarh, Rajasthan and Himachal Pradesh on its own and in Bihar as a junior partner in an alliance.
The BJP, on the other hand, has broadened its political influence and now controls 17 states either on its own or in coalition. The Electoral map of India has almost entirely turned saffron, indicating the BJP’s ascent to the position of political power in the nation. The electoral fall of Congress following the elections in the five states shown above has once again sparked public discussion about the institution’s impending demise. Some overzealous political commentators have written obituaries and requiems (Rai & Kumar).
STRUCTURE OF PARTY COMPETITION AFTER 1990s
After the 1990s, the rise of post-Congress polity resulted in further opening up of the field of party competition. The decline of the Congress meant that political space emerged at the Centre for many contenders and that in many states the Congress retreated in favour of new political formations. This development has produced a multi-party structure of political competition. The last 30 years witnessed that the national governments of India have always had either Congress or BJP as their leading partners and even when non-Congress, non-BJP governments came to power, they always depended on the support from either of these two parties. Thus a large number of regional or state parties in the competition arena are relevant only in connection with the two major national parties BJP and Congress (Mukherjee 2017).
CONGRESS IN RECENT ELECTORAL BATTLES
The Congress party suffered appalling defeats in the 2014 and 2019 national elections, taking home only 44 and 52 of the 543 available Lok Sabha seats, respectively. Since then, the group has yet to adapt to its new position. In numerous Indian states, it has been losing elections after elections. Most political analysts believe that Congress is without a true mass leader, something it has in abundance during its heyday (Jha, 13 April 2017).
In 2022, last year, the party’s score was zero out of five in five state assembly elections. It received 2.33 percent of the vote share in Uttar Pradesh, the nation’s most populous state and home to 80 Lok Sabha seats. It only received two seats in the so-called family boroughs of Amethi and Raebareli. Even when the 2017 total is added, the numbers are below double digits. In fact, the total number of votes the Congress has received in Uttar Pradesh over the past three decades falls short of the halfway point. The four other states were not any better. In Punjab, the party staked its claims on the Dalit vote; the incumbent Chief Minister, Charanjit Singh Channi, was defeated in both of his contests. In Uttrakhand, the party and her CM face Harish Rawat, both suffered crushing defeats. The Congress assisted the BJP in Manipur in winning elections on its own. Goa’s post-poll aspirations for the sum-of-the-parts coalition were crushed. Again, the outcomes don’t appear remarkable, but the specifics are startling.
In West Bengal in 2021, the Congress party allied with the Left Front and performed spectacularly poorly alongside Communist relatives, dropping its vote share to 2.9 percent. In Kerala, it battled against the same front and broke decades of tradition by facilitating Pinarayi Vijayan’s CPI(M) government’s re-elections. It joined forces with opportunistic thugs and made it possible for the BJP to retake Assam. It made a sequence of mistakes that caused Puducherry to fall to the NR Congress, but it managed to hold on to the DMK’s tail in Tamil Nadu.
Losses have a tendency to repeat themselves and create annihilation. States like Tamil Nadu have barred the Congress party from entering for 55 years, West Bengal for 45, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar for more than 30 years, Orissa and Gujarat for more than 25 years and so on. Voters have just overthrown it in Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Delhi as soon as they discovered a strong alternative front to advance their cause and address their linguistic and cultural complaints. (Indian Express, 13 March, 2022) .
RESURGENCE OF THE BJP AS THE DOMINANT PARTY
The emergence of the BJP as a major force in Indian politics soon overwhelmed Congress as the largest party in 1996, 1998, and 1999 and the majority party in the 2014 and 2019 general elections. Over the period of time, this party has become one of the largest political party in the country. It has challenged the supremacy of the Indian National Congress (INC), which upholds a form of secular nationalism and hold sway over Indian politics for quite a long period. In the journey of political parties after the independence a new dimension is added to the party system which is the emergence of the alternative to the Congress. In the last seventy years (till 2014) except for Congress no party was able to get a majority in the Lok Sabha on its own. Being an important institution in Indian politics it is inevitable to understand the evolution of the BJP in the Indian politics.
The Lok Sabha elections of 1989, 1991, 1996, 1998, 1999, 2004 and 2009 witnessed the stabilisation and expansion in the electoral support of the BJP both at the Centre and in the State politics of India. The BJP obtained 86 Lok Sabha seats in 1989, 120 seats in 1991, 160 seats in 1996, 182 seats in 1998, the same seat share obtained in 1999, 138 seats in 2004 and 116 seats in the 2009 General Elections. It is important to explain the growth of the BJP in the 2014 to 2019 general elections because in the 1984 Lok Sabha elections it obtained only two seats and was a very marginal player in national politics.
Luckily for the BJP, the opposition remains in disarray. Congress has been slow to rectify the organizational and leadership deficiencies laid bare in 2014. Left parties have seen a precipitous decline nearly everywhere save for the state of Kerala, its last remaining stronghold. The party (BJP) has become the central pole around which politics in India revolves. This distinguished position once belonged to the Congress, but its recent electoral stumbles and the BJP’s abundant successes have decisively changed the equation (Vaishnav, 2018). By May 2018, the BJP, either on its own strength or with its alliance partners, was ruling in 21 of the 31 states and union territories, expanding to the regions and states where it was never in power before. Recently, in 12 states where BJP ruled, has its own chief ministers and in the other five, it shares power with its allies. Altogether, the seat and vote gains mark a new high in the history of saffron politics in India. The lion’s share of the credit for the BJP’s resurgence belongs to Modi, who remains the most popular politician in India (Mishra, 2018).
OUT OF STEP WITH NEW AGE POLITICS OF PERFORMANCE
In Every state where the Congress has gone head to head with the BJP, voters have given BJP a huge thumbs up. The harsh reality is this; Congress has emerged even weaker in 2019. Although its seat tally has gone up by 8 from 44 to 52, the bulk of its seats has come from local boosters in three states. It won 15 seats in Kerala against a fast-fading CPM, nine seats piggy-backing on DMK in Tamil Nadu and eight seats in Punjab, thanks to the continuing popularity of its that-time Chief Minister Capt. Amarinder Singh. Without these 32 seats, its tally would have slumped to 20 seats. Now, while the Congress tally has gone up to 52 seats, its vote share has remained the same pitiable 19.5 per cent. The BJP from its part, won 303 seats (in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections) – up from the 282 it won in 2014 and in a majority of the states where it has a bipolar contest against the congress, its vote share crossed the 50 per cent marks, a remarkable feat in India’s first-past-the-post electoral system. The principle opposition party could not open its account in as many as 17 states/UTs. The most definitive symbol of the Congress demolition is Rahul Gandhi’s personal defeat on the family turf of Amethi (Outlook, 2019), where he lost to the BJP candidate Smriti Irani.
The politics of caste mobilisation and religion appeasement from the mental era are still being practised by the Congress. More than administrative effectiveness, Congress relies on a base of committed voters to win elections. A more recent example is the Madhya Pradesh Congress government, which vowed to eliminate farm loan payment as soon as it took office. The promiss hasn’t yet been kept. After a while, power outages are returning to MP. Congress never focused on fundamental government. It appears that it has not yet drawn any conclusions from Modi’s achievements in providing essential services and welfare programmes. Instead Congress’s major support comes from the 15-20 percent of Muslim voters spread throughout a number of states. the Largest Hindu caste in each state is then sought after to complete it. It can be the Gujjars in Rajasthan, the Jats in Haryana, or the Marathas in Maharashtra. Still, a sizable percentage of Dalit voters support Congress. But Congress has never done a good job of representing its constituents. In fact, Congress appears to think that keeping the electorate in poverty makes it easier to milk them repeatedly. Though programmes like Ujjwala, Mudra, and Saubhagya (which provides power connections to any willing family), among others, the Modi administration has done more for Dalit than it has for other Hindu castes and other religions. Congress still hasn’t grasped the fact that voters from different social groups desire service delivery more than a token representation of ministers from their caste or region now that we are in the post-mandal age (Opindia, 21 June, 2019).
Conclusion
The Congress has lost its share and doesn’t lok to be in a position to even pose a challenge to the current BJP regime in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. The party currently lacks a capable organisational structure, strong leadership, and an intellectual platform. To fight the BJP’s rise in the country, the Congress must revise its ideological platform and widen the party’s doors to those with right-wing political beliefs. The party can resurrect itself by reorganising the party structure, recruiting flag bearers and foot soldiers from the grassroots, and setting attainable goals for a political comeback in the far future. The demise of Congress spells the end of India’s democratic political system. In Indian politics, the two most powerful parties, the Congress and the BJP, used to counterbalance one another. The previous Congress system is being replaced by a newly emerging ‘BJP System’ as a result of the loss of this balance.
References:
Palishkar, Suhas. K.C. Suri, Yogendra Yadav. (2014). Party Competition in Indian States: Electoral Politics in Post-Congress Polity. Oxford University Press.
Rai, Praveen, and Sanjay Kumar. (2017). The Decline of the Congress Party in Indian Politics. Available online: https://www.csds.in/uploads/custom_files/1529066719_The%20Decline%20of%20the%20Congress%20Party%20in%20Indian%20Politics.pdf (Accessed on 15 October 2022).
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Opindia. (2019). Five reasons for the decline of the Congress party. Available online: https://www.opindia.com/2019/06/five-reasons-for-the-decline-of-the-congress-party/ (Accessed on 9 February 2023).
Authors
1Dr. Jyoti Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, School of Social Sciences, Central University of Himachal Pradesh, Dharamshala (India).2Rishi Kumar Research Scholar, Department of Political Science, School of Social Sciences, Central University of Himachal Pradesh, Dharamshala (India).