WHY CONG NEEDS TO FALL BEFORE IT CAN SOAR AGAIN

THE Congress must have introspected a zillion times since 2014, and they still haven't figured why India marginalises its oldest national party at almost every second opportunity.

- C P SURENDRAN

The results in Maharashtra again underline the party's irrelevance.

In Jharkhand, too, the Congress secured 16 seats to the BJP's 21; the JMM was the hero with 34 of the 81 seats. Hemant Soren's personal misfortunes, including a 5-month jail term on charges of money laundering, and tribal pride played an emotive role in his victory, as perhaps did his ₹2,500 monthly assistance scheme for women. Perhaps because the BJP also promised a similar dole.

In West Bengal, despite the harrowing R G Kar Medical College case, the TMC won all six seats in the assembly bypolls. Out of the three assembly bypolls in Kerala, the Congress won two, assisted by the CPI(M)'s lumpen politics.

In Maharashtra, the Congress won just 16 of the 288 seats, the kind of number a local party would not have minded. Despite the Maha Vikas Aghadi's social equity and welfare-themed campaigns led by Rahul Gandhi, and alliances with regional heavyweights like the NCP (Sharad Pawar) and Shiv Sena (Uddhav Thackeray), the results exposed the opposition's chronic inability to defeat one of the most cynically opportunist regimes ever to grace the Mantralaya.

During the general elections last summer, I pointed out that Rahul Gandhi's caste census agenda to consolidate minority and women's votes was not quite working out. The truly downtrodden are interested in money, not in the culture wars that mostly self-serving urban liberals are preoccupied with.