To be in a state of limbo or trishanku swarga—that is, to be perilously suspended between earth and heaven—is an idea available both in Christian theology and Hindu puranic texts. Though a deracinated Congress did not borrow it from either of the cultures, it has strangely found itself in a kind of electoral netherworld—the metaphorical realms of the idea in Indian politics.
To be in limbo is undoubtedly a platitudinal appellation for the party that has been in decline since 2014. But the irony is that the Congress itself has not come to reflect or rue about its perch of non-progress. Rather, it has attempted to develop, with some reverse ingenuity, capital around its very state of being left dangling by the voter. The party neither has its feet on the ground, nor is its leadership at the top able to hold things together.
The Congress, perhaps, stopped thinking like a national party a while ago. It tried to adopt the ideological agenda and smarts of regional outfits that fared better against the Modi regime, but those regional parties did not concede an inch to the Congress. Regional parties, which have been growing at the expense of the Congress since the 1970s, are unlikely to do any charity in the name of national interest or secular politics.
There is a kind of consolatory half-truth spoken about the Congress these days when people say it has essentially become “a party of southern India”. It is an attempt to anchor the grand old party somewhere on the map, but the ground realities for the party in the south are quite harsh.
Take the example of Kerala, where the Congress now leads the ruling coalition but does not have the numbers to form a government on its own. This limits its elbow room. Plus, the confusion created for almost 10 days over the choice of the state’s chief minister has eroded its image. It is astonishing that a national party created a fissure on a clean wall of victory to insert a dynasty-backed national general secretary in the chief-ministerial race—only to be stifled by coalition partners and grassroots reaction.
This should tell us that the Congress is caught in a time warp, a limbo of another sort. They have not come out of the imperious mindset of their past, when they imposed rootless favourites from the top. The post-2014 lessons and serial defeats should have taught them otherwise.
In Karnataka, the factional rivalry has been reduced to media entertainment. After the Kerala decision, D K Shivakumar and Siddaramaiah seem ready for a fresh round of slugfest at the expense of their Delhi leadership. The high command is now perceived as unable to transfer power to Shivakumar to honour its own word that was apparently given in May 2023. The central leadership’s procrastination has ensured that whatever change is made in the near future, it is likely to splinter the party in Karnataka. Neither Siddaramaiah nor Shivakumar is the forgiving type.
To manage success is as vital as achieving it. That’s a lesson imparted by Karnataka, where the Congress secured an overwhelming majority in May 2023, yet ended up running a sort of coalition of snipers. Surveys suggest the party’s appeal has slipped since. What if there is little chance of recovery after that, like has happened for the party in several of Indian states where it has been pushed to a fringe of irrelevance?
Its third state in the south, Telangana, looks calm for now. But the recent convivial public exchange between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chief Minister Revanth Reddy should have disturbed the party’s slumber in Delhi. In the other half of the Telugu country, Andhra Pradesh, which Congress dominated not so long ago, their revival looks like a pie in the sky. There are three big regional players in the arena—Chandrababu Naidu’s TDP, Pawan Kalyan’s Jana Sena and Jaganmohan Reddy’s YSR Congress. The BJP has landed with a cosy coalition arrangement here without a big ground presence. However, its presence is larger than the Congress’s, which won zero seats in two consecutive Assembly polls.
Finally, in the southern economic growth engine of Tamil Nadu, the Congress walked out of the DMK alliance and soon earned a “backstabber” tag and worse. In the Congress’s reasoning, it was perhaps fine to let go of the earlier alliance. But the more relevant question is about what they have walked into. They tied up with Vijay’s TVK with the hope of being its principal supporter, but with a substantial AIADMK splinter plumping for TVK in the trust vote, the Congress’s relevance has been jolted overnight. The stability that the AIADMK numbers offer to the Vijay government will likely alter a lot of arrangements.
One should not be surprised if something like what happened in Jammu and Kashmir in 2024 recurs, when the Congress was not accommodated in the cabinet even with a pre-poll pact. TVK’s realpolitik has pushed the party into the arms of a pre-poll BJP ally. So much for ideological sanctity that the Congress faults others on when they have landed on the same side as AIADMK.
With the benefit of hindsight, it appears the Congress misread the political diminishing of the DMK—they confused it for their demise. It is clear now that the Dravidian party is intact and is going nowhere in a hurry. On the other hand, Vijay’s triumph cleared the electoral deck of rigid Dravidian loyalties to foster a universal vote that works beyond ideology, caste, religion and gender. His victory was about neutralising the electoral space. And this makes it easier for the BJP, with organisation and determination on its side, to penetrate the space faster. The Congress, too, had a similar opportunity to deepen the Dravidian defeat, but it acted post-haste.
In the recent years, in its anxiousness to be at least a party of the south, the Congress has committed some grave strategic errors. They embraced the ideological rigidity of a party like the DMK on a number of issues like OBC politics, federal autonomy, cultural politics and delimitation. The arguments it embraced in the south divested it of an argument in the rest of India. That meant a voluntary surrender of their national space. This, too, placed the party in a limbo between the north and the south.
Sugata Srinivasaraju | Senior journalist and author of The Conscience Network: A Chronicle of Resistance to a Dictatorship
(Views are personal)
(sugatasriraju@gmail.com)