The Congress has flagged off their “Bharat Jodo Yatra”, from Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu, on Wednesday in an attempt to revive the party and re-create the brand of Rahul Gandhi before the next Lok Sabha elections in 2024. The intention is intense as the party feels that it is heading southwards as vote share in several elections have also gone down.
The Congress through this ‘padayatra’ (political journey to galvanise supporters) of 3,570 km across 12 States, is hoping to raise electoral issues such as price rise, unemployment, rising economic inequality, polarisation, and bitter Centre-state relations to connect with the masses which lately has been battered.
Irony is that the party has ruled the country for most of the time since Independence in 1947, and more recently for ten years between 2004 and 2014, is currently fighting for survival as many senior leaders are quitting. Congress is hoping that the protest foot march across the country will be a good beginning to address the questions raised about it and to arrest its rapid political downfall since 2014. India has 28 States and eight union territories, with polls being held in all of them barring six UTs.
Meanwhile Congress’ main opposition party the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) with its allies have their governments now are Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Haryana, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Goa, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Tripura, Manipur, Nagaland, Tripura, Mizoram, Sikkim, and Puducherry. They recently lost the Bihar government when Chief Minister Nitish Kumar jumped over to Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) to form an alliance and government. Now the BJP is number two in West Bengal, Bihar, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and Delhi.
The BJP and its allies, in fact, have governments in States and union territories covering 49.31 per cent of the Indian population, according to Census 2011 data. This covers 258 of the Lok Sabha seats.
Meanwhile, the BJP’s rising graph, corresponding with the drastic fall of the Congress, can be viewed using key numbers. The party has 303 Lok Sabha MPs, more than the collective Lok Sabha seats in all States and union territories ruled by the party and its allies. Alliance-wise, it won 351 seats out of the 542 constituencies when the 2019 general elections were held.
The Congress and its allies have governments in five States: Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Jharkhand, and Tamil Nadu. However, Congress presence in Bihar is miniscule. In Bihar elections in 2020 Congress had contested 70 seats and in the 243 member Assembly and got 19 seats which was down by eight seats. In 2015 Assembly election Congress got 27 seats. However in the states like Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh there is a Congress-led government. In Tamil Nadu even though Congress is with the ruling alliance, it is not the part of the government.
The presence of the Congress in the Lok Sabha explains its own rapid decline. The party had seen a historic low of 44 seats in the 2014 general elections. Its tally went up by just eight seats in 2019, and currently, the party has 53 MPs in the lower house of Parliament. Once a pan-India party, the Congress is losing its appeal rapidly in State after State and is in desperate need of a way out. The grand old party, clearly, is losing its national influence.
Even though the efforts are being made by the Congress to re-connect with the people, experts in political arena are commenting that the party needs to first revamp itself structurally right from the top and make the internal party leadership election transparent and ‘fair’. If not, the actual workers of the party on the ground will not get the clear signal on actually who is their party supreme leader.
