Shekhar Gupta has done the Congress party a rare favour. In a political culture where most “advice” comes from consultants with fat retainers and fragile spines, he has offered sharp, unsparing, and free counsel. Many professional poll strategists either cannot speak this plainly or would charge a fortune for saying only half as much. Gupta’s column is therefore best read not as yet another obituary of the Opposition, but as a tough-love memo that Congress leaders would be foolish to ignore.
Broadly, he tells Congress five things. First, without a revived Congress, there can be no credible pan-Indian challenge to Narendra Modi’s BJP, because regional parties are necessarily confined by geography and social base. Second, the party still sits on more than a remarkable 20 per cent of the national vote, a loyal one-in-five that any “startup” in politics would kill for, but treats this as hereditary entitlement rather than venture capital to be grown.
Third, humility, not entitlement, is the missing virtue: a party that still behaves like the natural party of power refuses to honestly ask why Prime Minister Narendra Modi keeps winning and it keeps losing. Fourth, Rahul Gandhi’s politics is overwhelmingly negative — built on anger, allegations and enemies — with no positive, future-facing counter-slogan to match “achche din” or “Viksit Bharat”. And finally, if Congress doesn’t reform itself, even its allies will begin to see it as a costly liability and drift towards an accommodation with Modi.
On much of this diagnosis, we can and should agree. But if we accept Gupta’s premise that the Congress has a “startup’s capital” of votes and a “legacy firm’s habits” in its leadership, we must also extend the prescription. A startup does not merely change its rhetoric; it redesigns its business model, its partnerships, its processes and its legal risk strategy. That is where the Congress needs an even more radical rethink than Gupta outlines.
Transactional alliances to long-term partnerships
The first change is conceptual. Congress must stop thinking in terms of ad hoc alliances and start building long-term partnerships. Alliances, as we have seen in state after state, are hurriedly stitched before elections and re-negotiated, usually acrimoniously, after each setback. Partnerships, by contrast, are based on a shared project, a clear division of labour and a multi-cycle horizon.
In practice, this means the party should sit down with like-minded regional forces and draw up a 5-10-year framework, and not 5-10-month seat bargains. Who leads where? Who concedes where? What is the minimum common programme beyond defeating the BJP? How will disputes be resolved without public acrimony? If every election is treated as a fresh bazaar of egos, the INDIA bloc — or whatever remains of it — will keep dissolving at the first sign of pressure.
Also read: India’s opposition produces more drama within their own ranks than against BJP
Junior in Assembly, Senior in Lok Sabha
The second element of a new playbook is a more honest recognition of where Congress is — and is not — the natural pole of attraction. In many states, regional parties have built strong assembly-level brands and networks that Congress simply cannot match in the short run. Yet, in the same states, Congress still has more resonance when the voter thinks of the Union government, of the Prime Minister, and of national policy.
It follows that the Congress must be willing to play junior partner in Vidhan Sabha politics, while bargaining for a larger share of Lok Sabha seats. This is particularly relevant in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Jharkhand, but not in the other Hindi heartland states such as Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. A model where, say, the regional ally leads the fight for the chief minister’s chair, while the Congress leads the national narrative and fields more candidates for Parliament, is not a concession of weakness; it is a recognition of comparative advantage.
Today, the party’s instinct is often the opposite: over-negotiating for assembly seats in states where it has little ground presence, and under-investing in building a serious Lok Sabha strategy. Gupta is right that the Congress must shed arrogance, but humility must be expressed not just in language, but in seat-sharing architecture.
Stop wasting ammunition on lost causes
Third, if the Congress truly wants to grow from 21 to 27 per cent, it must start thinking like a party that understands the mathematics of a first-past-the-post system. Too often it spreads its meagre resources across constituencies where its chances are close to nil — simply to “maintain a presence” or to massage local egos.
A professional party identifies its marginal constituencies — those where it lost narrowly or where its social coalition is close to critical mass — and throws everything at them. Candidate selection, cadre deployment, funding and leadership time should be ruthlessly prioritised for such seats. Repeatedly contesting hopeless constituencies with no booth structure and no realistic path to victory is not persistence; it is an expensive illusion.
Gupta’s metaphor of the startup is apt here: no serious startup keeps pumping money into a product that has no product-market fit. It doubles down where the data suggests a breakthrough is possible. Congress must apply the same clarity to its electoral map.
Also read: After Bihar, the vote share vs seat share debate is back again. Here’s why this matters
Politics between elections
Fourth, the party must get rid of the notion that “political activity” is synonymous with election campaigning. This is where yatras, however well-intentioned, can become a trap. If a Bharat Jodo Yatra or a march in Bihar becomes primarily a stage for one leader’s brand-building, with little follow-up in terms of organisational consolidation, then the images fade long before the next polling day.
Politics between elections should mean constant issue-based engagement: helping citizens navigate welfare entitlements, standing up on local land, water and law-and-order disputes, and maintaining a visible presence in panchayats, municipalities and district headquarters. Booth committees should meet to solve real problems, not just to hear the high command’s speeches on television. A conversation with the voter that is switched on six months before polling and switched off the morning after counting is not politics; it is seasonal advertising.
In that sense, the “startup” metaphor again helps. The customer (voter) is not someone you bombard with ads once in five years. She is someone you serve, listen to, and learn from every month, consciously improving your “product”.
‘Vote chori’ to serious legal strategy
Finally, and most crucially, Congress needs a professional legal and institutional strategy around elections. By all means, the party is entitled to challenge special revision of electoral rolls, to question dubious deletions or additions, and to raise alarms about bogus voters. But doing this only at the level of rhetoric — calling it “vote chori” in public meetings — is not enough.
The party should energise its cadre around claims, objections and appeals at every stage of the electoral roll process. This means training workers on how to file objections, how to track hearings, how to document irregularities and how to follow up after the final publication of rolls. Every booth-level worker should know that defending the integrity of the roll is as much a political act as putting up posters.
Beyond that, Congress must build a strong central legal cell focused exclusively on election law. If its leaders genuinely believe that, for example, the transfer of Rs 10,000 into women’s bank accounts from government funds during the Model Code of Conduct — under a newly announced scheme — constitutes a corrupt practice, then this argument should not remain a talking point in press conferences. It should become a common ground of multiple election petitions, carefully drafted, evidence-backed, and filed within the limitation across constituencies.
Gupta rightly notes that India has a first-past-the-post system. That makes post-result statistical complaints about aggregate vote share largely irrelevant. What does matter is the willingness to challenge specific, provable irregularities under the law, seat by seat, and to build jurisprudence around what counts as misuse of state power during elections. A party that is serious about the rule of law cannot abandon the legal battlefield and fight only on television.
Risk of reinventing the same wheel
If, instead, the Congress leadership chooses to reinvent the same wheel — another yatra, another round of personal projection for Rahul Gandhi, another season of anger about EVMs or the Election Commission — it will confirm Gupta’s darker warning. The party will not merely stagnate; it may go from bad to worse. A startup that keeps pouring money into brand advertising while neglecting product, distribution and compliance does not suddenly turn profitable because the logo becomes more familiar. It collapses.
Gupta’s column is, in that sense, an opening, not a conclusion. He has reminded Congress that humility and a positive vision are non-negotiable. The next step is for the party to rebuild its architecture of partnerships, to accept being junior where it is weak and senior only where it is strong, to fight smart in marginal seats, to live politics every day and not just in campaign season, and to treat the law not as a nuisance but as an instrument.
If it can do that, its one-in-five “capital” can indeed become the seed of a new national alternative. If it cannot, then the “Congress-sized hole” in Indian politics that Gupta describes will not be filled by a miracle. It will be filled by others – or left as a dangerous vacuum in a democracy that badly needs more than one credible pole.
KBS Sidhu is a former IAS officer who retired as Special Chief Secretary, Punjab. He tweets @kbssidhu1961. Views are personal.
(Edited by Saptak Datta)