You may have seen this on social media last week: a chap who secured 85 percent is downcast and the one with 45 percent is jubilant. The real joke here is that this is not a joke. Unwittingly, the die-hard BJP supporters who drew consolation by sharing this were making a very deep point about politics — it’s all relative. What matters is not where you are located, but how that point fits into a trend line.
The Congress’ final tally of 99 seats may not look like a great score compared to the BJP’s 240. Yes, it is still the Congress’ third lowest tally. But in politics, numbers do not tell the real story. The relevant political fact is that it is the second best bounce-back achieved by the Congress, next only to the turnaround of 1980. For the last two elections, the Congress was stuck at a morale-breaking level of just 44 and 52 seats. Worse, 32 out of its 52 seats in the 2019 election came from just three states: Kerala, Punjab, and Tamil Nadu. In none of the three states was the BJP its main rival. In Tamil Nadu, it was a junior partner to the DMK.
This time, the real target behind the BJP’s bluster of ‘400 paar’ was to push the Congress further down and thus decimate the only other party with a national footprint, a rival ideology and a potential leader. There was a talk of the Congress slipping below 40 seats and turning into a South Indian National Congress. The Congress defied all the odds to survive and nearly doubled its tally. End of the day, it looks like a party in ascendancy. That’s what makes it such an amazing turnaround.
The Congress has made all-round gains. The number of Hindi heartland seats from Haryana and Bihar has gone up from a meagre five to 23. In its former strongholds, the INC has almost swept its share of Maharashtra’s seats and not allowed the BJP to open its account in Punjab. By winning both the seats in the troubled Manipur, acing the contest in Nagaland and the Garo Hills in Meghalaya, it has regained a sizable footprint in the Northeast. From being the weakest link of the Opposition chain, it has planted its feet in this tug-of-war.
The real story lies in the vote share. In overall terms, the Congress’ share of national votes has increased by 1.7 percentage points (pp), healthy but not spectacular. But that is a misleading figure, as the Congress contested 93 fewer seats this time. If we focus more appropriately on vote shares in the constituencies contested, the Congress has gone up by a whopping 9.8 percentage points from its vote share in 2019. Compare this to the BJP, which dropped 1.6 pp votes in the seats it contested. Except Kerala, Odisha, and Punjab, the Congress has registered positive swing in votes in all the major states. To be sure, much of the Congress’ rise in vote share comes from states where it contested as a junior or equal partner of the INDIA bloc. As Table 1 and Table 2 show, Congress gained here 23 percentage points per seat contested. Its gains were much more modest, just 3 percentage points, in the seats where the Congress contested on its own or was the dominant partner of the INDIA coalition.
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Breaking seven myths
The 21-month-long momentous journey of the Congress that began with the Bharat Jodo Yatra has busted a few myths by which the grand old party had enveloped itself:
- Myth 1: Congress can never recover once pushed to the third place in a state: This has been busted by the Congress’ victory in the 2023 Telangana assembly elections after being pushed to the third place (in terms of seats) in 2019 Lok Sabha. The gains were replicated in the recent Lok Sabha elections.
- Myth 2: Congress cannot take on the BJP in a one-on-one contest in Lok Sabha elections, especially in the Hindi heartland. In 2019, there were 190 such seats where the top two slots were occupied by the BJP and the Congress. The Congress won just 15 of those. This time, the Congress took 62 out of 215 such constituencies. It managed to bring down the BJP’s margin of victory in these seats by half. The associated myth that the Congress always ends up with a negative premium in national elections in the Hindi heartland was also broken in Rajasthan and Haryana, where the Congress improved upon its assembly election performance.
- Myth 3: Congress can never recover the space taken away by a regional and community-based political force. The manner in which the Congress vanquished Badruddin Ajmal’s AIUDF in Assam, which had been steadily gaining at its expense for the last two decades and encroached upon the social base of the JJP in Haryana, disproves this.
- Myth 4: Congress cannot withstand Operation Lotus: In simultaneous assembly bypolls, the same Himachal electorate that favoured the BJP for the Lok Sabha rejected half of the MLAs who had defected to the BJP.
- Myth 5: Congress is a burden on its alliance partners, with lower strike rate. That used to be the case, but Table 3 shows that the Congress disproved it this time, not just in Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra, but in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Delhi, and Jammu and Kashmir, where it may not have matched the senior partner in seats but did so on contested vote share. The only exception was Jharkhand, where the INC was in fact the senior partner fighting more seats than the JMM. Across the states, the Congress has added value to the alliance, not just by adding votes but also by bringing in its own soft-power and ideological coherence.
Graphic by Soham Sen | ThePrint - Myth 6: The Congress was dead in Uttar Pradesh, after the disastrous show in the assembly elections. For a party that had sunk to just 2 per cent voteshare, this is a miraculous turnaround. The Congress yet had a worse strike rate than the SP, but it won landmark seats: not just the two that everyone talks about but also Allahabad, Saharanpur, Sitapur, and Barabanki. The Congress proved critical to the alliance as it provided comfort to the Dalits to shift away from BSP and kept the Muslim voters with INDIA coalition despite the challenge from the Muslim candidates of the BSP.
- Myth 7: Congress cannot connect to and build on the energy of movements. After decades of being and playing the Establishment, the Congress has finally learnt to draw upon the energy of anti-establishment politics. This was visible in the way Congress benefited from the farmers’ movement in Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, and Western Uttar Pradesh, and the Muslim citizenry-led anti-CAA-NRC protests. (Congress’ failure to connect with the tribal-led-anti-mining- conglomerate-movement may hold the clue to Congress’ relative failure in Chhattisgarh.) This election witnessed the largest and most organised effort by civil society —led by platforms like the Bharat Jodo Abhiyan (to which the authors are associated) — to connect non-party political movements, peoples’ organisations and citizens to the INDIA partners.
All this is just a beginning and there cannot be any room for complacency. Amid all these successes, there are many failures to reckon with. Having established itself as the front-runner in Telangana, the Congress failed to absorb the social bases of the imploding BRS. In Odisha, it missed a golden chance to position itself as an alternative to the jugalbandi of BJD with the BJP. In Karnataka, it failed to reap the harvest of its government’s implementation of its poll promises. In Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Uttarakhand, it is yet to find its way. In West Bengal, its poll strategy managed to lose political goodwill, a potential partner and gifted away six seats to the BJP. In Delhi, which it ruled successfully for 15 years, it is yet to recover its shape and structure.
There is a long way to go for the Congress in this unlimited overs Test match of politics. But 99 not out is not a bad score at the end of a gruelling day on a bad pitch in the face of body-line bowlers, compromised umpires and hostile commentators.
Yogendra Yadav is National Convener of the Bharat Jodo Abhiyan. He tweets @_YogendraYadav. Rahul Shastri is a researcher. Shreyas Sardesai is a survey researcher associated with the Bharat Jodo Abhiyan. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)
So we are planning to bring back the party that ravaged our country for decades out of spite for the supreme leader. Why can’t we help in the emergence of new parties? Why can’t social activists who have started new parties stick to improving their own? Why an intellectual thinker like YoYa who had started a party of his own, is genuflecting before an insincere entitled fourth/fifth generation upper caste privileged tantrum prone dynast of unteachable mediocrity is beyond all limits of rational explanation. Now even the sister and the brother in law is joining in. Next it will be the nephews. Is that the only replacement of the supreme leader available to India? Have we already forgotten the his arrogant conduct during their last stint in power. Do we really believe he is anything but a dauphin ensorcelled to faux left ideals who will be an even more rapacious dictator? Has YoYa forgotten had Mr Mukherjee and Chidambaram did to the Anna movement that he was so close to? If AK could bring AAP to power in 2 states, with time even YoYa can do the same. He need not start such abject charana vandana of the first family in hopes for scrapes from the high table. Not yet.
YoYa should keep his efforts to convince CONgress his candidature private. Public is not much interested. A party that ruled the country most part post independence, unable to get 100 seats three times in a row is not ANY kind of achievement. One only makes a fool out of oneself by making a mountain out of such molehill.
And the fact that the Congress party is a socialist junkie is a reality, not a myth.