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Congress in the Times of the post-Congress EraSurviving sans Politics

Suhas Palshikar

Behind the dramatic demise of the Congress in 2014 is a

long history dating back to the 1970s and 1980s. The

Congress has often chosen to ignore those deeper

reasons for its recent decline. Similarly, the failure of the

Congress as also its possible strengths become evident

only when we disaggregate the decline of the party

state-wise. This leads to a curious but useful pointer—

the party may have to take on the Bharatiya Janata Party

in states where it is locked in a bipolar contest with the

BJP in order to create political space for itself. Above all,

this paper argues that more than the leadership issue,

the factors responsible for the decline of the Congress

are the organisational neglect and complete abdication

of politics. The paper then maps the challenges and

limitations facing the Congress, particularly in its third

life, the phase of survival.

Suhas Palshikar (suhaspalshikar@gmail.com) teaches at the Department of Politics and Public Administration, Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune.

Not many political parties in India have the burden of carrying a long history. The Indian National Congress (Congress) is one such party that has so far always

remained central to calculations of competitive politics in India. Its role as the ruling party for a very long time (1947–77, 1980-89, 1991-96 and fi nally 2004–14, amounting to over 55 years of independent India’s existence of 67 years) makes it distinct from most other parties in India. While some continu-ity marks the long life of the Congress, in reality, the party has gone through many “lives.” This makes it diffi cult to analyse the party—the “Congress space” in India’s politics (roughly speaking, an accommodative, centrist space that is tolerant of plurality and contestation) and what goes in the name of the Congress often get confused with each other. To wit, today’s Congress itself may not know what it is. It talks of Gandhi–Nehru–Gandhi as icons but rarely manages to clarify to itself and to its fast dwindling followers what it stands for in today’s context.

Today’s Congress is the third life of the party. From an early post-independence party of government and development (life of hegemony), the Congress entered a more complicated phase of internal troubles and stiff opposition from outside which characterised its second life (life of confrontation) and then entered a third life when it was no more a guaranteed ruler and had to operate within a political milieu character-ised as the “decline of the Congress” (life of survival). During the fi rst two lives, various ideological positions were shaped and identifi ed mostly with reference to the Congress. Its central role in India’s government and politics led to the emergence of “non-Congress politics.” So much so, that till the 1970s and even into the 1980s, “opposition” in the context of India’s politics practically meant parties opposed to the Congress. From “non-congressism” of the late 1960s to the slogan of Congress-mukt Bharat during the 16th Lok Sabha election in 2014, the party continued to be at the centre of competitive politics despite many ups and downs. All through its post-independence existence, breakaway groups routinely named themselves as “Congress” with some appellation or suffi x. These nomenclatures are not merely attempts to cling to the historical legacy associated with the “Congress” Party; they also indicate awareness and existence of the Congress space.

And despite the existence of such a space, the political con-text of the late 1980s and 1990s presents us with an entirely different set of issues and concerns and these have produced a very different Congress. Since 1989, the party has had to cope

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with and fi ght for existence in the midst of more substantial multiparty competition. This transition from a party that shaped the politics of the country to a party that is now shaped by politics around it has been rather diffi cult and painful for the Congress. So much so, that both in the mid-1990s and later in the mid-tens of the new century, doubts have been expressed about the capacity of the party to survive. Elections to the 16th Lok Sabha (2014) have almost confi rmed these doubts.

This paper begins by discussing the electoral downslide of the Congress and then proceeds to explain it in terms of the social bases of the party (Sections 1 and 2). Section 3 focuses on the political geography of the electoral decimation of the Congress. The larger issue, however, is what the party’s down-fall signifi es in terms of the major limitations that it faces. Section 4 seeks to map these limitations.

1 Electoral Downslide

The Congress is historically known not only for electoral domi-nance and single-party rule but also for its hegemonic role in India’s political life. However, such hegemony can be shaped—or sustained—only on the strong foundations of electoral victories. A review of the Congress’s electoral history would make it abundantly clear why the late 1980s happen to be a critical period for the party. Of course, in 1977, the Congress was defeated for the fi rst time at the all-India level, but it bounced back in 1980 with a clear majority and then remained in power for almost a decade. That return of the Congress and subsequent developments following the assassination of Indira Gandhi postponed the decline of the party. But that postpone-ment also indicated that the Congress in 1977, even in its defeat, had adequate resilience to win power despite being discredited by the Emergency and despite a split in the party following the elections of 1977. On the other hand, in 1989, the party had lost that resilience and therefore, it failed to make an impressive comeback though it did manage to come to power in 1991.

There are three explanatory grids that help us understand the decline of the Congress. The fi rst is the inevitable logic of competitive politics. It can be argued that once the framework of competitive politics is put in place, historical legacy can only postpone the rise of real competition and multiparty elections—what one work describes as “Learning to Lose” (Friedman and Wong 2008). The Congress could postpone the effect of that logic in the immediate post-independence period by combining the factor of his-torical legacy with the factor of leadership. The “Nehru factor” made the difference in the electoral arena and also greatly contributed to

the shaping of the hegemony of the party. The Nehru factor does not mean just the personality but the ideology and strat-egy of rulership adopted by and identifi ed with him. It also means that there was nothing that made the Congress invin-cible and as soon as the Nehru factor wore out, the logic of competitive politics began to have an effect. This argument suggests that the logic of competitive politics would, sooner or later undermine the apparent invincibility of the “domi-nant” party. Even during Nehru’s own lifetime, the vote share of the Congress declined between 1957 and 1962 (Table 1) and the capacity to convert votes into seats remained stagnant (Figure 1). His departure was naturally bound to have adverse consequences on both these counts.

Second, the rise of Indira Gandhi as a charismatic leader adopting populist political measures ensured simultaneously that the party would withstand the pressures of democratic competition in the short run (1967–77), but fi nally succumb due to its organisational weakness which also emanated from the same factor. In hindsight, we can now see how the down-fall of the Congress was destined due to the historic victory of Indira Gandhi in 1971. That victory was almost completely devoid of any organisational strength or network. A new edifi ce emerged in which there was no organisational linkages between the top leader and the voters. This development decimated the strengths of the party in most states of India. Once the charisma wanes or once the charismatic personality disappears from the scene, such an edifi ce begins to crumble rather easily and in a precipitious manner. Post-1985, this is what happened to the Congress. Rajiv Gandhi did not have the charisma of Indira Gandhi nor did he inherit a strong organisation on which he could rely.

Third, as the crises of the political economy developed through the 1970s, the party suffered a defi cit of social bases. Its strategy of organising the Green Revolution that brought it the support of the newly prosperous farming communities in North India helped it only temporarily and soon the newly prosperous peasant proprietary classes became disenchanted with the party because they were given an inadequate share in power. This happened most notably in the case of the backward peasantry community—later identi-fi ed as Other Backward Classes (OBCs). In a sense, this devel-opment resulted from the party’s own strategy. The Congress had adopted a strategy not to overemphasise social cleavages and instead make room for all social sections. But this strategy was fraught with the challenge of power sharing between the dominant upper caste communities and the newly mobilised aspiring communities. Congress could not give adequate share to the latter nor could it convince the former for a power sharing arrangement. This put enormous

Table 1: Congress Performance in Lok Sabha Elections, 1952–85 Turnout ENP/v Vote Share Seats/Total

1952 45.6 4.5 45.0 363/488

1957 46.6 3.9 47.8 371/494

1962 55.4 4.4 44.7 361/494

1967 60.9 5.2 40.8 283/520

1971 55.3 4.6 43.9 352/518

1977 60.5 3.4 34.5 154/542

1980 56.9 4.2 42.7 353/542

1985 64.1 4.0 48.0 415/542ENP/v is the “effective number of parties in terms of vote share” calculated as per the formula developed by Taagepera and Shugart (1989). N=1/åpi2 where pi is the fractional share of i-th party and å stand for the summation of overall components. Source: For Tables 1 and 2, Data Unit CSDS.

Figure 1: Congress Seat-Vote Multiplier, 1952–852

1

0 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990

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pressure on its “catch-all” strategy leading to its decline in the post-1989 period.

Limited Gains from Indira Gandhi Strategy

All these tensions and strains are evident in the politics of the Congress during and since the 1970s. Indira Gandhi did attempt, in a very tentative manner, cleavage-based politics in the 1970s and combined it with her populism, it did produce dramatic dividends. However, as later events were to show, these gains were only very temporary and the Congress victory of 1980 and 1984–85 was very much devoid of social policy and focused social bases. Instead, those two electoral victories were contingent and contextual; they did not have any long-term strategy for the survival of the party. This superfi ciality was more evident in the outcome of the 1991 election once the cohering factor of leadership had disappeared. It is in this sense that the Congress came to be associated with a dependence on leadership emerging only from one family.

Tables 1 and 2 report the performance of the Congress in the parliamentary elections from 1952 to 2014. The party was often criticised in the times of its dominance that it received undue advantage of the electoral system (of simple plurality, that is, fi rst past the post or FPTP) in which a disproportion-ately higher proportion of seats went to the party in comparison to its vote share. Known as the vote multiplier,1 this factor explains the larger victory for the party than it deserved; because it polled votes much below the 50% mark and yet won seats much above the half way mark! This advantage is clearly seen in Figure 1. However, in Figure 2, the advantage almost completely disappears. Therefore, rather than looking at the favourable multiplier as undue advantage emanating from the system, it would be useful if we saw it as an indication of the “real” dominance of the party and, thus, the disappearance of that advantage in the 1990s equally emphatically indicates that the party had lost its dominant position.

2 Narrowing Social Base

In the fi rst two parliamentary elections, the Congress drew support from across almost all social sections. This was mainly a function of its being the legatee of the inde-pendence movement and the mass character of India’s independ-ence movement. This legacy gave the Congress its catch-all or non-cleavage based social base. However, the appeal of the fi rst Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, transcended social groups even after the fi rst decade of independence. Therefore, the Con-gress continued to retain the same non-cleavage based charac-ter in the 1960s. This was also because the parties opposed to Congress engaged in the exercise of building two mutually contrasting social coalitions—one comprising the conserva-tive and well-to-do elements (Jan Sangh and Swatantra) and the other comprising mostly the lower classes (the socialists and the communists). This development helped the Congress in retaining a non-cleavage based character and attracting all sections (albeit in varying degrees). Heath and Yadav (2010)

show that Congress received massive and almost uniform sup-port from all caste groups in 1962 (p 195).2 Thus, the fi rst decade and a half of democratic politics in India witnessed the rise of a catch-all political party in the form of the Congress opposed by politics of social cleavages from both ends of the left –right spectrum. The Congress during this period chose not to iden-tify with any one social group. Its policies as party in power, too, were more accommodative than biased in favour of any one group. The broader planks of nation building, unity, self-reliant industrial development and large-scale welfare meas-ures combined with selective state ownership, produced a con-sensus which earned for the party successive victories in which most social sections were more or less equal partners. The large mass base of the party, popularity of its top leader and its capacity to produce a larger consensus constituted the defi ning elements of what Rajni Kothari later labelled as the “Congress system” (Kothari 1964).

Erosion in 1967

This mass base eroded for the fi rst time in 1967. First, the new voters or the relatively younger voters began to get restless and

were less attracted to the party that was by then in power for two decades. As the election study of 1967 shows, while the Congress’s overall support declined between 1962 and 1967, re-spondents below the age of 25 voted much less for the Congress—with a gap of 7 per-centage points between their support to the Congress and the overall votes polled by the party in the survey.3 But it was not only the somewhat expected disenchantment of the younger voters that marked 1967; the support

for the Congress among various communities lacked any strong pattern. While the Congress did get more support (Heath and Yadav 2010: 196) among Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs), it received less support among Muslims than its average support. The party responded to this setback by focus-ing on Muslims along with SCs and STs. It went on to garner support among the upper castes too, but failed to achieve that same level of support among the OBCs—its support among OBCs was 7% less than its average base in the 1971 survey. Iron-ically, while the erosion to its strong base was underway, this weakness of the Congress—that it had weak support among the OBCs—kept company with the party during the 1990s and greatly contributed to the overall decline of the party.

While data on economic class is not easy to reconstruct from past surveys, if we use education as proxy for class during that initial period of 1967–71, then what do we fi nd? In 1967, among

Table 2: Congress Performance in Lok Sabha Elections, 1989–2014 Turnout ENP/v Vote Share Seats (%) (%)

1989 61.9 4.8 39.5 197

1991 55.9 5.1 36.6 244

1996 57.9 7.1 28.8 140

1998 62.0 6.9 25.8 141

1999 60.0 6.7 28.3 114

2004 58.1 7.6 26.5 145

2009 58.2 7.7 28.6 206

2014 66.4 7.0 19.3 44Total seats 543 for the entire period.

Figure 2: Congress Seat-Vote Multiplier, 1989–20141.5

1

0.5

0 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 2020

Source: For Figures 1 and 2, calculated by author.

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the highly educated (with college education), the Congress had less support. If this indicates the beginning of disenchantment with the party among the “middle classes,” the trend becomes quite pronounced in 1971. As we move from non-educated respondents to respondents with higher levels of education, support for the Congress declines. There is therefore room to argue that in 1971, apart from the clear pattern of community-based support, the Congress also received more support from the poor and less from the well-to-do. That is why the 1971 social base of the Congress can be described as an attempt to build a cleavage-based social coalition (Heath and Yadav 2010: 211-13). The shift of the OBCs away from the Congress became more pronounced in 1991. Again, using recall data, Heath and Yadav (p 201) show that the Congress base among OBCs was decidedly less (a gap of 7 percentage points from its average support) in 1991.

As we move from the period of Congress dominance to politics during the decline of the Congress (during the 1990s), the weaknesses of the previous period become more prominent and the strengths of the earlier period fade away. By the 1970s, OBCs had already become restless about the Congress’s politics and this was refl ected in the results from the north Indian Hindi-speaking states. The Congress never tried to ameliorate this situation. The failure of the party to respond satisfactorily to Mandal mobilisations during the late 1980s further exacer-bated its uneasy relationship with the OBC communities, partic-ularly in states where OBCs had begun to acquire political agency as a social group. But during the 1990s, the party also lost votes among the upper castes consistently. Finally, the famous social coalition of 1971 began to crumble when the Congress started losing votes among the Dalits and Adivasis. As Tables 3 and 4 report, Congress’s social base among different community and class blocs from 1996 to 2014 became progressively faceless; the party lost votes among not only the Dalits and Adivasis but also polled relatively less among the Muslims—though much higher than its overall vote share.

Searching for a Social Base

Throughout the third life of the Congress, the party kept grop-ing for a social base. Indira Gandhi initiated the strategy of building a political coalition of upper castes, Dalits, Adivasis

and minorities—a strategy later identifi ed as “coalition of ex-tremes” and practised in Madhya Pradesh under Digvijay Singh’s leadership (Jaffrelot 2003: Ch 12). Through the 1990s, almost everywhere one extreme of that coalition—upper castes—deserted the party. But the party could also not be-come a party of the marginalised because on the one hand the SCs began to vote for various other alternatives—mostly state-specifi c alternatives—and as Table 4 shows, in the post-1991 period, the Congress never really drew its strength from the poor. It clearly lacked any class character at all. The contin-gency of communal polarisation resulting from the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) continued emphasis on Hindutva has meant that the Muslims still choose to vote for Congress in relatively greater numbers. With Christians and Adivasis also preferring the Congress a little more than most other social sections, the party gets the image of a party of minorities. This feature was much more in prominence in the 2014 elections (Palshikar 2014: 60). As survey data for the 2014 elections indicate, the BJP has been successful in attracting Adivasi votes in large proportions (Palshikar and Suri 2014: 43). More importantly, the all-India data on Muslim voting is also some-what misleading in that the Muslims of Assam, Kerala, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh (UP) and Bihar are either deeply split or do not vote for the Congress in large numbers at all (Alam 2009: 94; Sardesai et al 2014: 32-33). These details suggest that from a “catch-all” party, the Congress is rapidly moving to become a “catch-none” party. The apparent support of the minorities is only a temporary and weak trend in that journey.

3 Geography of Decimation

For most of its existence, the Congress could claim that it was the only truly “all-India” party. When it was the “dominant party,” its dominance spanned almost the entire country dur-ing the 1960s. Even in the initial period of its decline (during 1989-99), the Congress remained a signifi cant force in many states. However, this distinctive feature of the Congress comes under a cloud when we start disaggregating the political geo graphy of Congress’s performance over the years.

First, even in the times of the Congress system, that aggre-gated picture camoufl aged the weak points of the party at the state level. In South India, Kerala and Tamil Nadu were the states where the Congress system never really took off. Not only was the Congress not able to retain power in these two states, the political competition, too was not shaped by the Congress. Similarly, in Madhya Pradesh, Odisha and West Bengal also, the Congress system was very weak or almost non-existent even during the time of Congress dominance. In fact, in all these states, the ability of the Congress to win elections did not produce the Congress system and also did not result in hegemony of the Congress. We can classify the states as non-Congress states, states with only an electoral domi-nance by the Congress and states having a Congress system. Such a classifi cation yields an interesting result that very few states indeed were in the third category. The Congress system did emerge at the all-India level, but not many states witnessed it even during the 1950s and 1960s.

Table 3: Congress Base among Community Groups (1996–2014, %) Upper OBC SC ST Muslim Overall Congress Vote

1996 25 25 34 42 36 28.8

1998 22 23 28 32 32 25.8

1999 21 24 30 46 40 28.3

2004 23 24 26 37 36 26.5

2009 26 24 27 38 38 28.6

2014 13 15 19 28 38 19.3Source: Data Unit, CSDS.

Table 4: Congress Base among Class Groups (1996–2014, %) Rich Middle Lower Poor Overall Congress Vote

1996 26 28 28 30 28.8

1999 26 27 30 29 28.3

2004 26 30 26 26 26.5

2009 30 29 30 26 28.6

2014 17 20 19 20 19.3Source: Data Unit, CSDS.

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Second, among the states that may be included in the category of Congress system states—Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and UP—we can make a further distinction between states with a strong Congress system and ones with a weak system. Gujarat, Rajasthan, UP and Bihar would fall in the latter category because there the Congress easily lost support of key communities and also failed to restrict the rise of alternative world views that could form the basis for undermining the Congress system. It is no wonder, therefore, that following Kerala, the states that elected non-Congress governments in 1967 were precisely from this group of weak Congress dominance or a weak Congress system (Punjab, UP, Bihar, Odisha, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu).

Third, the Congress seems to have a limitation in that when it loses a state, it rarely recovers space there. This has happened in Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and later in UP and Bihar. Odisha and Gujarat are on the verge of joining this group of states. In other words, the capacity of the party to bounce back in democratic competition seems to be very limited. Only when the adversaries are weak, can the party retain its dominance, but when confronted by and removed by strong adversaries, the Congress practically vacates the political space at the state level. But more than the nature of the adversaries, this feature has perhaps something to do with the social base of the Congress.

Congress after 1989

Against this backdrop, how does the Congress of the post-1989 period look like? We can imagine three different groups of states in the post-1989 period as far as the Congress is con-cerned. First, there are states where the party retained power for much of the two-and-half decades since the 1990s. We can call them “Congress states” of the post-Congress era (though of course, of these, the party has fi nally lost Delhi, Haryana and Maharashtra by the end of 2014). Then there are states where the Congress keeps winning power from time to time or is at

least the major opposition at the state level. These states may be called “Congress-presence” states. Finally, there are states where the Congress has been reduced to being less than signifi cant, a third or distant player. We call them “non-Congress states.”

The tables in the Appendix throw more light on the Congress’s decline in contemporary times. While we have identifi ed some states as Congress states implying that the Congress has been a dominant force in these states even during the post-1989 pe-riod, the performance of the party in its bastions shows a story of inevitable decline. Of the eight states listed in this category, the party has already lost power in three by early 2015. In these three states, Delhi, Haryana and Maharashtra, the party has lost badly and survey data indicate that invariably the party has lost its base among all social sections.4 Thus, if we were not taking a long-term view, these states could easily go into the category of non-Congress states! While the Congress could retain power in Arunachal, its base there is shaky with a section of the state party joining the Arunachal Congress and then coming back to the original party. In Assam, in the 2014 parliamentary election, the party lost its pre-eminence and a communal polarisation between the BJP and All India United Democratic Front might further decimate the party in that state. Thus, this entire category actually becomes quite empty—there is a possibility that there will be no Congress states any more in the near future.

The group of non-Congress states includes, besides Tamil Nadu in the south, states in the north and east. But more than the geography, what is more crucial is the time factor. In Tamil Nadu, the Congress lost relevance long back in 1967 and has never regained any relevance. Thus, by now, for more than four decades the party has been only a nominal third player there. Its ability to win seats further declined when the Moopanar faction formed the Tamil Maanila Congress and later when political competition in the state became more complex and coalitional. In UP and Bihar, the problems began at the same time as in Tamil Nadu, in 1967, but Congress managed to reemerge in 1971 and again in 1980. Finally, it lost the script in 1989–90 in these states—so its irrelevance in UP and Bihar (including Jharkhand) is now 25 years old. In West Bengal, the Congress lost power in 1977 and has never been in the reckoning since. In 1982 and 1987, it polled 36% and 42% votes and similarly, its vote share was robust till the 1996 assembly election. Once the faction led by Mamata Banerjee left the party to form the Trinamool Congress, the Congress in West Bengal became a non-entity.

Two traits emerge from this review of the Congress states and the non-Congress states. One is that when Congress loses votes and social bases, it keeps losing consistently. The other is that these states show that once the Congress is defeated, it almost never is likely to win the control of government back from its competitors.

States Critical for the Future

This leaves a large number of states that are going to be critical for the ability of the Congress to resurface. These are states from the category where the Congress continues to have a

Table 5: Classification of States in post-Congress PeriodCongress States Congress-Presence States Non-Congress States

Delhi* HP Tamil Nadu

Haryana* Punjab UP

Maharashtra* Rajasthan Bihar

Manipur Gujarat Jharkhand

Assam Goa West Bengal

Arunachal Pradesh Karnataka Sikkim

Meghalaya Kerala

Mizoram Andhra Pradesh**

Odisha**

MP

Chhattisgarh

Uttarakhand

Tripura

Nagaland

Jammu and Kashmir# *In these states Congress lost power in 2014–15 and as such they may have since moved to the “Congress-presence” category.**In these states, the Congress may have slid to a more long-term exile following its very weak performance in 2014.# J&K is included in this category since by entering into coalitions, the Congress was in power at the state level for much of the period under review and even in 2014, though out of power, retained its base.

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presence and hence the potential to contain its decline. On the face of it, this is a longlist of states—15 states spread across the country. Within these, there are actually two somewhat dis-tinct groups: one, where the Congress keeps coming back to power even during the phase of its decline and, two, states where it has a seemingly strong existence but that has not been translated into electoral victories for quite some time. Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Rajasthan, Goa, Karnataka, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Nagaland form the fi rst subgroup and the remaining states belong to the latter subgroup. Given the overall demoralisation of the party following the 2014 out-come, it would be a moot point if it can win back states like Punjab, Rajasthan or Andhra Pradesh (and Telangana) in the next round of elections. But even more complicated is the story of states like Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh (MP), Chhattisgarh and Odisha where the party has been out of power for more than a decade and is on the verge of becoming irrelevant. Only a two-party competition in these states helped the Congress to remain the main opposition. But as developments in Odisha show, the moment the third player emerges, the Congress easily slides into oblivion. In the three BJP-ruled states, the Congress continues to be the only opposition, with at least one-third of the vote share but in a bipolar contest, this vote share is not adequate to win seats.

Given the vagaries of the FPTP system of election and Congress’s limited ability to convert votes into seats, the party would need to poll around 40% or more votes in bipolar states and at least 30% in states marked with multiparty competition. Tables A1, A2 and A3 (pp 45, 46) indicate the problems the party faces in this respect. In the last fi ve years (2010–15), the Congress has polled (a little less or more than) 40% votes in only eight states. Of these, the two states of Gujarat and Chhattisgarh are perhaps the most crucial for the party. In Gujarat, even during the times of Narendra Modi, the party managed to keep polling 38% to 39% votes consistently and it is only a step from this for the party to add a few more percentage points to its vote when it will start winning more seats there. In Chhattisgarh, its performance even in terms of seats has been robust and waiting to improve as the incumbency fatigue sets in. Thus, ironical as it may seem, the revival programme of the party has to begin from these two core BJP states.

Looking at the category of Congress-presence states poses us with a dilemma: is the Congress likely to move on the lines of its trajectory in the non-Congress states, or is there ground for its survival? Since its defeat in 2014 parliamentary elec-tions, the Congress has not shown any signs of recovery. The experience of Andhra, Telangana and Odisha suggests that en-try of new players displaces the Congress rather easily. This is also what has happened in UP and Bihar around the late 1980s and in Maharashtra, Karnataka and West Bengal in the late 1990s. This is not just about the arithmetic of elections and coalitions; it is about social bases. As we saw in the previous section, the Congress nationally lacks the strong loyalty of al-most any social section and this more or less applies at the state level too. Therefore, when a new party attracts various social sections, the Congress is helpless in winning back those

sections again. State after state is witness to this fundamental sign of decline.

4 Limitations

It is clear from the foregoing that rejuvenation of the Congress is going to be an uphill task. Following 2014, survival itself is at stake. As we saw in the previous section, the party continues to have a geographic space available to it even today. However, the sociopolitical space is lacking. There are states where the Congress still has a sizeable presence in terms of vote share and a political position of being the only opposition force; but the party does not have a sharp social profi le even in those states. Both nationally and at the state level, the votes of the Congress come mainly in a residual manner; that is, some of the traditional Congress voters still continue to vote for the party; the less educated and voters with less media exposure still vote for the Congress in relatively large numbers; in bipolar contests the party wins votes from a cross section just because voters would not want to vote for the incumbent (party or can-didate); and yet it would be diffi cult to say that any social section is particularly close to Congress. The Adivasi vote is getting divided between the Congress and BJP in the crucial states of MP and Chhattisgarh. The Dalit vote has already deserted the party in UP and Bihar; besides, Dalits of Gujarat too do not vote for the Congress any more. While the Congress did fare much better than its average as far as the Muslim voters are concerned, in UP, Bihar and West Bengal the Muslims are in-creasingly moving away from the Congress. Thus, in the group of Congress-presence states, the party does not come out with any social character or identity. This is equally true of eco-nomic class. The Congress today is neither a party of the poor and lower class nor is it a party of the middle classes.

These limitations of the absence of social space for the party are both cause and effect of the absence of political space. In competitive politics, parties occasionally lose support from their core constituency. In such situations, they either win back those constituencies or win over newer constituencies and retain their salience in competitive politics. In the case of the Congress, because the Congress’s original broad social constituency was derivative (originating in the pre-independence mobilisations), rather than carved through post-independence political activity, the party has not been able to win back those sections that cut loose from the party. It could almost be said that the broad social constituency of the Congress during the Nehru years was more by default—because there were very few claimants to those social constituencies and the moment the adversarial claims began to be extended, the Congress went on losing those sections one by one and state by state. As for winning over new social bases, this has been the most glaring failure of the party in reshaping and renewing itself on a regular basis.

Critical Weakness

This limitation was accompanied by the shift in the party’s and its governments’ economic and social policies. Zoya Hasan (2012) discusses the dilemmas arising out of that shift. As she

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points out, during the post-Indira years, the Congress kept moving away from “ideological frameworks” (Hasan 2012: 226) and she locates this in the global tendency among political parties in the era of globalisation. Bijukumar also chronicles the shifts in economic policy of the Congress and concludes that rejuvenation of the party is possible only within the context of a policy of distributive justice (Bijukumar 2006: 260–63).

For a party that was for long ideologically propped up on Nehru’s socialism and Indira Gandhi’s rhetoric of populism, the shift of the 1980s and 1990s was going to be a tough trans-formation. But it is not the economic shift that really constitutes the critical challenge for the party. The near-total absence of organisation and the leadership crisis that emerged in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination were more critical to the problems faced by the Congress. Ever since the party entered its third life—during Rajiv Gandhi’s time itself—it has been lacking in any political programme that would attract particular social sections.

Rajiv Gandhi and later Narasimha Rao steered the govern-ment towards a different policy of economic development. Both of them failed to adapt the party’s politics to this new turn. In the case of Rajiv Gandhi political ignorance and in the case of Rao political inability led to this predicament. But the net result in both cases was the same—a near total abdication

of politics in the deeper sense. Rajiv Gandhi could not engage in politics because he was clueless and Rao could not because he was constrained by his limitations, not being the “leader” of the party and also not having mass appeal.

Circumstances brought the Congress back to power in 2004—it is not at all that the party earned that victory; victory was thrust on the party (see Yadav (2004) and Yadav and Palshikar (2009) for analyses suggesting how circumstantial factors rather than any design and initiative brought the Congress back to power). For the Congress, it is convenient to say that Sonia brought it back to power. The fact is that Sonia Gandhi’s rise to leadership of the party had only a very periph-eral effect and that too on the factions within the party, not on the electorate (Yadav 2004, p 5396 and Note 12). So, the real decline of the party is not the dwindling numbers—numbers only tell the story more starkly—the real decline of the Congress is in its failure to engage in politics and thereby ceding the sociopolitical space in the fi rst place.

For a party to survive for a quarter of a century without doing politics is somewhat extraordinary and the Congress has got away so far without doing politics. Now that it is in the wilderness, it would have a limited choice—either re-engage with politics or witness a slow demise. If the latter happens, it would be not because of lack of opportunities but because of unwillingness to do politics.

Notes

1 The term multiplier, for comprehending the discrepancy between vote share and seat share, is attributed to Eric P W de Costa. See Rudolph and Rudolph (2008: 29).

2 They use a “recall” question from the 1967 survey, that is, a question about who the respondent voted in previous election, in order to estimate the support for parties among different social sections.

3 Source: CSDS Data Unit. CSDS has been con-ducting National Election Studies since 1967 and is the most reliable and largest data unit on India’s elections. For details, see, Lokniti Team; 2004. Also see www.lokniti.org. The 1967 survey, however, was limited in that it did not have women respondents. Weighted data sets.

4 For details of survey data for these elections, see, respectively, reports in Indian Express, 12 February 2015 (“How Delhi Voted”), 21 October 2014 (“How Haryana Voted” and “How Maharashtra Voted”).

References

Alam, Mohd Sanjeer (2009): “Whither Muslim Politics?,” Economic & Political Weekly, 44 (39), 26 September; 92–95.

Bijukumar, V (2006): Reinventing the Congress, Jaipur: Rawat.

Friedman, Edward and Joseph Wong (eds) (2008): Political Transitions in Dominant Party Systems: Learning to Lose, NY: Routledge.

Hasan, Zoya (2012): Congress after Indira, New Delhi: OUP.

Heath, Oliver and Yogendra Yadav (2010): “The Rise of Caste Politics: Party system Change and Voter Realignment, 1962–2004,” Diversity and Change in Modern India, in Anthony F Heath and Roger Jeffery (eds), Oxford: British Academy and OUP; 189–218.

Jaffrelot, Christophe (2003): India’s Silent Revolu-tion, New Delhi: Permanent Black.

Kothari, Rajni (1964): “The Congress System in India,” Asian Survey, 4 (12), December, pp 1161–73.

Palshikar, Suhas (2014): “The Defeat of the Congress,” Economic & Political Weekly, 49 (39), 27 September, pp 57-63.

Palshikar, Suhas and K C Suri (2014): “India’s 2014 Lok Sabha Elections: Critical Shifts in the Long Term, Caution in the Short Term,” Economic & Political Weekly, 49 (39), 27 September, pp 39–49.

Rudolph, Susanne Hoeber and Lloyd I Rudolph (2008): Congress Learns to Lose: From One-Party Dominant to a Multi-party System in India, Friedman and Wong (eds), 15–41.

Sardesai, Shreyas, Pranav Gupta and Reetika Syal (2014): “The Religious Fault Line in the 2014 Elections,” Panjab University Research Journal-Social Sciences, 22 (2): 28–44.

Taagepera, R and M S Shugart (1989): Seats and Votes: The Effects and Determinants of Electoral Systems, New Haven: Yale University Press.

Yadav, Yogendra (2004): “The Elusive Mandate of 2004,” Economic & Political Weekly, 39 (51), 18 December, 5383–98.

Yadav, Yogendra and Suhas Palshikar (2009): “Between Fortuna and Virtu: Explaining the Congress’ Ambiguous Victory in 2009,” Economic & Political Weekly, 44 (39), 26 Sep-tember, 33–46.

REVIEW OF URBAN AFFAIRSNovember 29, 2014

Rethinking Governance of Public Toilets: Lessons for Swacch Bharat from Hyderabad – Indivar Jonnalagadda, Sandeep Tanniru

Mapping the Coastal Commons – Mukul Kumar, K Saravanan, Fisherfolk and the Politics of Coastal Urbanisation in Chennai Nityanand Jayaraman

Analysing Urban Growth Boundary Effects on the City of Bengaluru – Madalasa Venkataraman

Delusory Transformations: Transportation Projects under JNNURM in Dehradun – Gaurav Mittal

Selective Inclusions and Exclusions: Land-Use Planning and Development in Ratnagiri – Ratoola Kundu, Geetanjoy Sahu

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Table A2: Congress Performance in ‘Congress-Presence States’—1989–2015 1989–93 1994–99 2000–04 2005–09 2010–15 Seats Seats Votes (%) Seats Votes (%) Seats Votes (%) Seats Votes (%) Seats Votes (%)

HP 1990/93 68 9 36.5 31 43.5 43 41.0 41 43.8 36 42.8

52 48.8

Punjab 117 87 43.8 14 26.6 62 35.8 44 40.9 46 40.1

Rajasthan 1990/93 199 5 33.6 153 45.0 56 35.7 96 36.8 21 33.1 76 38.3

Gujarat 1995/98 182 33 30.7 45 32.9 51 39.3 59 38.0 61 38.9 53 34.9

Goa 1999/2002 40 20 40.5 18 37.5 17 35.6 16 32.3 9 30.8 21 38.6

Karnataka 1994/99 224 178 43.8 34 27.0 65 35.3 80 34.8 122 36.6 132 40.8

Kerala 140 55 32.1 37 30.4 62 31.4 24 24.1 38 26.4

AP 1994/99 294 181 47.1 26 33.9 185 38.6 156 36.6 21 11.7 91 40.6

Odisha 2005/09 147 10 29.8 80 39.1 26 33.8 38 34.8 16 25.7 27 29.1

MP 1990/93 320/230 56 33.4 172 40.6 38 31.6 71 32.4 58 36.4 174 40.7

Chhattisgarh 90 – – – – 37 36.7 38 38.6 39 40.3

Uttarakhand 70 – – – – 36 26.9 21 29.6 32 33.8

Tripura 60 10 32.8 13 34.0 13 32.8 10 36.4 10 36.5

Nagaland 1989/93 60 36 51.5 53 50.7 21 35.9 23 36.3 8 24.9 35 46.0

Jammu and Kashmir (from 1996) 87 – – 7 20.0 20 24.2 17 17.7 12 18.0

Appendix

Table A1: Congress Performance in ‘Congress States’—1989–2015 1989–93 1994–99 2000–04 2005–09 2010–15 Seats Seats Votes (%) Seats Votes (%) Seats Votes (%) Seats Votes (%) Seats Votes (%)

Delhi 2013/15 70 14 34.5 52 47.8 47 48.1 43 40.1 8 24.6 0 9.7

Haryana 2005/09 90 51 33.7 9 20.8 21 31.2 67 42.5 15 20.6 40 35.1

Maharashtra 1995/99 288 141 38.2 80 31.0 69* 18.8 82* 21.0 42* 18.0 75* 27.2

Manipur 2000/02 60 26 33.7 22 28.7 23 26.3 30 34.3 42 42.4 20 26.2

Assam 126 66 29.2 61 30.1 71 39.8 53 31.1 78 39.4

Arunachal Pradesh 1995/99 60 37 44.3 43 50.5 34 44.4 42 50.4 42 49.5 53 51.9

Meghalaya 60 24 34.6 25 35.0 22 30.0 25 32.9 29 34.8

Mizoram 1989/93 40 23 34.9 6 29.8 12 30.1 32 38.9 34 44.6 16 33.1 * In 1999, the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) was formed and it won 58 seats and polled 22.6% votes; in 2004: 71 and 18.8%; in 2009: 62 and 16.4% and in 2014 : 41 seats and 17.2% votes.

Table A3: Congress Performance in ‘Non-Congress States’—1989–2015 1989–93 1994–99 2000–04 2005–09 2010–15 Seats Seats Votes (%) Seats Votes (%) Seats Votes (%) Seats Votes (%) Seats Votes (%)

TN 1989/1991 234 26 19.8 0* 5.6 7* 2.5 34 8.4 5 9.3

60 15.2

UP 1989/91/93 425/ 403 94 27.9 33 8.4 25 9.0 22 8.6 28 11.6

since 46 17.3

2000 28 15.1

Bihar 2005 324/ 71 24.8 29 16.3 23 11.1 10 5.0 4 8.4

February and October 243 9 6.1

Jharkhand 2005/09 81 – – – – – – 9 12.1 6 10.5

14 16.2

West Bengal** 294 43 35.1 82 39.5 26 8.0 21 14.7 42 9.1

Sikkim 1994/99 32 0 18.1 2 15.0 1 26.1 0 27.6 0 1.4 0 3.7 *In 1996 Tamil Maanil Congress was the breakaway party that won 39 seats and polled 9.3% votes; in 2001 it won 23 seats and polled 6.% votes; **In West Bengal, Trinamool Congress was the breakaway party since the 2001 election. In 2001 it won 60 seats and polled 30.7% votes; in 2006 30 seats and 26.6% votes and in 2011 184 seats and 38.3% votes. Source for Tables A1, A2 and A3: http://eci.nic.in/eci_main1/ElectionStatistics.aspx; accessed 7 April 2015. For results of J&K assembly election in 2014, Data Unit, CSDS.