If Sunday’s byelection results have sent out any message, the primary one is of the increasing irrelevance of the Congress, which did not win even a single seat. It contested the bypolls in Haryana, Odisha and Telangana, and lost everywhere it had contested. It hit the nadir by getting a humiliating 2.18% vote in Odisha, a state where it was once in power and later the main Opposition. Its alliance partner, RJD, won the seat of Mokama in Bihar; another one, Shiv Sena (Uddhav) won the seat of Andheri East in Maharashtra, against NOTA, in a contest where it was given a walkover by the BJP, which did not contest the polls. While it would be wrong to draw any conclusion from this about the likely outcome of the Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat elections, but if these results are seen as a trend that has been developing over the last few years, then the Congress has reasons to be worried about its prospects in both states.
Congress’ defeat in Haryana—it got 39.35% of the votes—proved that the BJP (got 51.32%) is well entrenched in that state. But the most interesting result came from Telangana’s Munugode Assembly seat, where the Congress with a 10.58% vote share came a distant third to BJP’s 38.38% and Telangana Rashtra Samithi’s 42.95%. And this at a time when Rahul Gandhi’s supposedly successful Bharat Jodo Yatra is travelling through Telangana. The Yatra entered Telangana on 23 October and Munugode went to the polls on 3 November, which should have given the last-mile push to the Congress if it was in the fight. But now it is obvious that it was nowhere in the fight, which is quite a downfall for a party in a state it once ruled when it was a part of undivided Andhra Pradesh; and then later was the main Opposition party post the 2018 Telangana Assembly elections. In fact, the BJP was nowhere in Telangana in the 2018 Assembly elections, which were all about K. Chandrasekhar Rao’s TRS and the Maha Kootami—the alliance that the Congress had formed with some parties including the CPI. The BJP was nowhere in the state, and got a mere 7.1% vote, while the Congress on its own got 28.4% and the TRS 46.9%. From there for the BJP to reach a nearly 40% vote share is a long way to have traversed, and should have an impact in the Lok Sabha elections in 2024, as the contest in that state seems to be getting bipolar. Even otherwise, it was the alliance with the Left parties that saved the TRS at Munugode, which was once a Left bastion, as the Left transferred its votes to KCR’s party and helped it win with a margin of a little over 10,000 votes. Telangana has 17 Lok Sabha seats, of which 9 are with the TRS, 4 with the BJP, 3 with the Congress and 1 with the AIMIM. From the way things are shaping up, it looks tough for the Congress to squeeze out even one seat from Telangana in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. What then happens to Rahul Gandhi’s big plan to focus on the 129 Lok Sabha seats of the Southern states in 2024, the reason why the Bharat Jodo Yatra is spending so much time in the South? It cannot win anything in Tamil Nadu without piggybacking on the DMK and is, therefore, totally at the mercy of M.K. Stalin in terms of the number of seats it will be offered to contest, if at all there is an alliance. Kerala will see a tough contest as the Left Front in power there has managed to buck the trend and return to power in the Assembly elections in 2021 and will go into 2024 with that advantage. There is no guarantee how well Congress will do in Karnataka as the BJP is quite strong there. And in Andhra, it is Jagan Reddy’s YSR Congress all the way, with very little space for the Congress.
As for Odisha, another state that Congress ruled once, it seems it is not the Congress but the BJP that is poised to pose a challenge to Naveen Pattnaik’s ruling BJD, which it defeated with a margin of around 10,000 votes at Dhamnagar. Most importantly, BJP reached nearly the unassailable 50% vote share, with 49.09%. While the Congress lost its deposit and just disappeared.
Congress’ problem is that it is no longer being considered as the alternative to the BJP. If some opposition is coming to the BJP, it is coming primarily from the regional parties in the states. Even then the Mahagathbandhan in Bihar—with all the combined strength of the RJD, JDU, Congress and several other small parties—could not win the seat of Gopalganj.
It is increasingly looking like, neither does the Congress have the message nor the messenger to have a resonance with the voters. And if this trend hits Himachal and Gujarat as well, then the Congress is in trouble in both states.
Joyeeta Basu