What if I said the two worst things to happen to the Congress in the past two decades are its victory of sorts in 2004 and the 99 in 2024? You'd ask me to get my head examined. Before that, however, please hear me out.
The Congress party is in the news, obviously because of the complex seat-sharing talks in Maharashtra and Jharkhand. It has made one wise decision outside these states, by leaving all nine by-elections in Uttar Pradesh to its INDIA bloc partner, the Samajwadi Party (SP). In victory or defeat, in coalition or by itself, the party continues to confound both its supporters and rivals.
To understand how the party got here, we need to start with 2004. The fact is, neither snatching defeat from the jaws of victory nor its reverse applies to the Congress in the national picture. That's why the two worst things to happen to the Congress in these 20 years have been near-things that it conveniently declared as victories.
The first was a score of 145 in the 2004 Lok Sabha elections, just seven ahead of Vajpayee's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). With this, Sonia Gandhi, helped along by the Left's historic peak of 59 seats, was able to put together the United Progressive Alliance (UPA). It ruled for a decade, improving its tally in 2009. The second was the 99 it scored in the 2024 general elections, as part of the 234 for the INDIA coalition it putatively headed.
If you were a Congress loyalist, you'd hail each as a great success and hail the Gandhis as BJP-slayers. If you were an opponent, you'd say 2004 was a fluke and 2024 was still a defeat, the third successive time the party failed to reach triple figures.
Why would a commentator then call these two the worst things to happen to the Congress? Why, when one brought it a decade in power, and the other cut Narendra Modi to size?
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