Congress in the doldrums

At last some senior Congress functionaries have begun to speak up in favour of a major overhaul in the Party. The drubbing that the Congress faced in the Delhi polls actually calls for serious introspection. A responsible political party owes it to do constant course correction. Today the Congress has lost its clout in national and regional politics. Even the belligerent Amit Shah has begun reflecting and is trying to understand why voters rejected the BJP. JP Nadda, the BJP President has conceded that there is need for reflection on the recent rout that the Party suffered after it had done so well in the Lok Sabha elections and won all 7 seats. Clearly, people vote differently in the Lok Sabha and Assembly polls. AAP has been judged by voters to be doing well for Delhi but the Party might not have the bandwidth to be in Parliament yet.

There is at this point in time no credible alternative to the BJP at the national level. This is the reason for the hubris and hatred that became the grammar and idiom of the Delhi election. But the BJP now knows that such coarse language has diminishing returns. It will obviously tone down its rhetoric of hatred. At least that is what the rational voters of India believe. It is the Congress Party that does not seem to have learnt any lesson. The Nehru-Gandhi scion goes around with a bluster and reacts irrationally to whatever Prime Minister Modi says, thereby leaving his party seniors scrambling for cover. The Congress has old Turks like Luizinho Faleiro taking charge of North Eastern states without providing the state teams with any confidence to move forward. At the state level, the Congress workers feel let down by the parent party which now looks like it is unlikely to return to power even in 2024. These days one hears solitary voices like that of P Chidambaram and Shashi Tharoor but even they are hardly adequate to rekindle the enthusiasm of the Congress primary units and grassroots workers which used to be its strength in the past. Now the primary units in all eight state of the North East are in disarray. Every Congress MLA here is simply trying to keep his/her own flock (vote-bank) together because it is impossible to do much at the state level. At this rate India would need a robust alternative to counter the radicalism of the BJP. Perhaps AAP is that alternative