Twin-Shot Treatment

To Revive Itself, The Congress Needs To Fix Its Internal Problems And Work On Its External Messaging.

- Shashi Tharoor

IT HAS BEEN a difficult few weeks for the Congress, but none more so than for the evergreen party loyalist, who has had to witness a sharp decline in the fortunes of her party.

These are disheartening times for Congress supporters—after all, with the momentum and energy that the party, galvanised under Rahul Gandhi’s leadership, carried into the elections, there was little to suggest that its electoral fortunes would pan out the way they did. But conventional wisdom found itself up-ended, and in the months to come, the party and the supporters who carry it, will have to engage in serious introspection on what went wrong and work to identify the path ahead for the party.

To be certain, while the current reality is indeed grim, obituaries for the Congress remain premature. For one, as the results from Kerala, Punjab and Tamil Nadu have shown, the party is far from “out for the count” and nearly 12 crore Indians (just short of 20 per cent of the electorate) cast their vote in favour of the Congress. While this may have only translated to 52 seats in the Lok Sabha, it still is a long way beyond the cries of irrelevance that commentators have been rashly ascribing to the party since the declaration of the results.

At the same time, as the more sagacious of our supporters recognise, the Congress has found itself in the throes of similar woes in times past be it in terms of its electoral fortunes in 1977 and 1989, and the wilderness between 1996 and 2004, or in the daunting circumstances precipitated by the leadership vacuum following the tragic assassinations of two of its former prime ministers. And yet, in the aftermath of each of these instances, the grand old party displayed an immense capacity to weather change (and indeed suitably pivot itself to the evolving political context of the time), and bounced back to victory each time.