Can Congress, Stitch Together A Strategy To Challenge Modi In 2019?

The wins in the three heartland states have re-energised Rahul’s Congress, but can the party stitch together a strategy to challenge Modi in 2019?

- Raj Chengappa

Success, George S. Patton observed, is how high you bounce when you hit the bottom. A year ago, when Rahul Gandhi took over as president of the Congress, his own as well as the party’s fortunes had touched a nadir. The Narendra Modi-Amit Shah juggernaut was thundering along and the Bharatiya Janata Party now controlled 18 of the 29 states. The Congress, on the other hand, after its worst ever showing of 44 seats in the 2014 Lok Sabha election, kept slipping further and further in state assemblies where it had been in government, including Maharashtra, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Assam, Uttarakhand, Kerala, Manipur and Meghalaya. It also failed to prevent the BJP from registering its sixth consecutive victory in Gujarat. The only big states where it won polls were in Punjab and Karnataka (that too through a post-poll coalition).

A year later, the Congress has bounced back by capturing power in three vital states in the Hindi heartland—Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. The wins spell a dramatic revival of the Grand Old Party as a force to reckon with. They have enhanced Rahul Gandhi’s status as the prime challenger to Narendra Modi in the 2019 general election. They have stripped the Modi-Shah combine of the aura of invincibility, forcing the BJP to go into deep introspection. More importantly, they have put a big question mark on the re-election of Modi as prime minister—no longer the certainty it seemed a year ago. It’s game on for 2019.