New Delhi: The Congress was trounced in the Lok Sabha elections but rose from those ashes of defeat to be part of coalitions that wrested Maharashtra and Jharkhand from the BJP, riding to power with Sonia Gandhi in the saddle and pragmatism as the theme in a year marked by spectacular lows and modest highs.
With the two states, the Grand Old Party – which switched tracks from going solo in the Lok Sabha elections to judiciously tying up with not always like minded allies – now has seven states in its bag, up from a low of just two. The Congress story of 2019 essentially revolved around Sonia Gandhi, who was back as party chief after her son Rahul Gandhi resigned as Congress president. He took moral responsibility for the Lok Sabha poll defeat, the party’s second consecutive loss in the general elections.
The change of guard in the second half of 2019 coincided with the upward electoral swing for the party, which has seen several setbacks since its 2014 general election loss.
The Congress, which managed just 52 MPs in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections that witnessed the BJP returning to power with a bigger mandate, perhaps surprised itself with better than expected performances in the Haryana and Maharashtra assembly polls.
The year ended with the Jharkhand assembly elections. While power slipped away in Haryana, the Sonia Gandhi helmed party adopted a pragmatic approach to assume charge of Maharashtra and later Jharkhand.
The Maharashtra election results presented Congress with the opportunity to oust the BJP, which emerged as the single largest party in the state. Working closely with NCP chief Sharad Pawar, Sonia Gandhi decided to ally with ideologically distant Shiv Sena to keep the BJP out. The gamble worked. The NCP-Congress combine not only formed the government in Maharashtra in alliance with the Shiv Sena but also ensured that the Sena, one of the oldest allies of the BJP, quit the NDA government as a quid pro quo.
The fracture of the Sena-BJP friendship, engineered by the NCP and the Congress, was seen in opposition ranks as a major coup. While Rahul Gandhi remained in news for his frequent foreign jaunts this year, his mother went on to script another election victory for the party in Jharkhand.
In a first, Sonia Gandhi agreed to not only play a junior partner to the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha in a pre-poll alliance but also gave her nod to declare JMM’s working president Hemant Soren as the chief minister face of the JMM-Congress-RJD alliance. Congress veterans were surprised when Sonia Gandhi conceded 43 seats to the JMM, keeping a smaller number for her own party. (PTI)
