It is useful to begin with recent chronology. The Congress fought the elections in Tamil Nadu as a junior partner of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK). It fought in West Bengal against the Trinamool Congress (TMC). Both the DMK and the TMC have lost. The Congress has now started supporting the TMC in West Bengal and broken ranks with the DMK to support the surprise winner in Tamil Nadu, the Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK).
What has the DMK done for the Congress over the past decade? In 2014, the Congress fought in Tamil Nadu on its own. The scars of events such as the 2G scam were still fresh. Both the DMK and the Congress got zero seats. In 2019 and 2024, it fought with the DMK and won eight and nine Lok Sabha seats in the state. Had the DMK not accommodated the Congress, this would have been impossible. Despite having only 7.2% of the country’s total Lok Sabha seats, Tamil Nadu contributed 15.4% and 9.1% to the Congress’s Lok Sabha tally in 2019 and 2024, respectively.
Did the DMK’s politics have problems? The Tamil Nadu results, where the debutant TVK broke the entrenched Dravidian duopoly in the state’s politics, are a major indictment of establishment politics. Was the Congress party unaware of these problems? Or was it happy to sweep them under the carpet as long as it served its political purpose while piggybacking on the DMK? Anybody with even an iota of political honesty will see the truth in the Congress’s opportunistic and hypocritical post-poll promiscuity.
In West Bengal, the only two MLAs of the Congress are Muslims and come from a district where the majority population is Muslim. Its victory reflects a larger trend in the state where Muslims consolidated behind the TMC in areas where they were not numerically strong enough to elect one of their own without the TMC but broke ranks with it where they could afford to. Rahul Gandhi while campaigning in the state, had actually (and rightly) blamed the TMC’s political approach and poor governance as abetting the BJP’s polarisation politics and creating anti-incumbency-driven headwinds for itself (the TMC).
None of that is to be taken into account now, and Rahul Gandhi is describing the TMC’s loss as vote-theft. West Bengal currently risks lapsing into an Assam-like political situation where Muslims are overwhelmingly consolidated behind the Opposition, and Hindus are behind the ruling BJP. Rahul Gandhi’s handpicked leader in Assam, the son of a now deceased Congress heavyweight, failed to win even his own constituency. And although Mamata Banerjee’s party performed better in West Bengal than the Congress in Assam, she lost her assembly seat.
Assam had the lowest deletions in its SIR equivalent exercise, the special revision or SR. Tamil Nadu saw as much deletion of voters as West Bengal. To blame communal polarisation-driven results in West Bengal and Assam on vote theft, while hailing the Tamil Nadu results as revolutionary is tantamount to an ostrich burying its head in the sand when faced with danger.
This is not all. The successes of the Congress party, such as state-level victories and its relative revival in 2024, are attributed to Rahul Gandhi. Electoral and, more importantly, organisational failures — the Congress has not been re-elected in any state government since 2014, largely due to party feuds and factional problems — are almost always the party’s legacy issues or institutional capture.
His fair-weather approach to alliance partners is also not new. The Maharashtra alliance experiment with the Shiv Sena is another such example. Even with the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and Samajwadi Party (SP) in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, things are far from consistent. The Congress has also done business with the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Haryana and benefited from it, even though it accuses the AAP of being a Hindu-Right prop in the country. This is not to say these parties have no political problems — but the Congress does not seem to mind when things are going well. Problems surface when accountability is sought after failure.
So, what exactly is Rahul Gandhi’s — and his party’s — core politics today? Is this a virtuous, liberal, progressive, or even revolutionary politics, as portrayed in things such as the Bharat Jodo Yatra and rabble rousing against the current regime’s alleged institutional capture? Or is it rank opportunism, where the party is more than willing to enjoy power when available? To be sure, opportunism is an existential trait for politicians. But a successful politician is one who deploys this tactic to the benefit of their party.
The Congress, and the Opposition at large, made a relative advance in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. It was described as an ideological victory without drawing the right lessons. Counter-strategising by the BJP — embracing cash transfers, accepting the caste census demand etc — and ambitions that ran ahead of performance in the Opposition ranks frittered away these gains. Instead of introspecting what went wrong and what needs to be done, the narrative championed by India’s leader of Opposition is that elections are an entirely stage-managed affair in the country today. At the same time, he is turning his back on political allies who stood with the Congress when it was at its lowest.
Such politics, one which reeks of either delusion or denial vis-à-vis reality and treachery vis-à-vis allies, may work in the short-term. But it cannot help India build a robust, organic, and pragmatic Opposition that the country so badly needs at the moment. That would require honest introspection, fraternal criticism, and reinventing fights rather than alibis.
The views expressed are personal
