Maharashtra rout warning bell for Congress to buck up or sink into oblivion

Mahayuti’s sweet revenge

On Saturday, as results for the Maharashtra Assembly polls rolled out, the Mahayuti drew sweet revenge. The state’s ruling alliance created history by securing 234 seats in the 288-member Maharashtra Assembly – a stunning three-fourths majority, with the BJP alone picking up 132 of the 148 seats it contested. The Shinde Sena bagged 57 seats while Ajit Pawar’s NCP romped home with an unbelievable 41 seats, with Ajit comfortably retaining his traditional Baramati constituency against his nephew and NCP-SP candidate, Yugendra Pawar.

The results were nothing short of a nightmare for the MVA leadership. The huge gains MVA had made in the Lok Sabha were eviscerated as its constituents ended with just 48 seats. Sharad Pawar, the ailing octogenarian ‘Chanakya’ of Maharashtra politics, stood completely outfoxed by the Mahayuti with his party reduced to just 10 seats. Uddhav, who desperately wanted to prove that despite Shinde’s betrayal and the vertical split in the original Sena, he was the true torchbearer of his father and Shiv Sena founder Bal Thackeray’s political legacy, met a similar fate with his party winning just 20 of the 95 seats it contested and his son, Aditya Thackeray, barely retaining his Worli seat by a slender margin of 8,801 votes against fellow-dynast, former Congress leader and Shinde Sena nominee, Milind Deora.

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Blow to Sena(UBT), bigger setback for Congress

But, a worse fate has befallen the Congress, which will now feel the pain of the heavy electoral blow, not just in Maharashtra but also nationally considering its similar routs in last month’s Haryana and Jammu poll results. The Grand Old Party, which with 102 seats contested the largest share of constituencies, could win in only 16.

Expectedly, shock and bewilderment were writ large in the Congress party by the time the poll leads turned into actual results. After last month’s unexpected rout in Haryana and Jammu, the Maharashtra results must have brought with them a sense of déjà vu for the Congress. Understandably then, the party took refuge in the same accusations that it had made after the Haryana shocker – that the results were “inexplicable, beyond comprehension” and do not reflect ground realities.

Congress media department bosses Jairam Ramesh and Pawan Khera alluded to “some conspiracy somewhere to get us defeated”, ranted about a compromised Election Commission and manipulation of the election apparatus and called upon all INDIA bloc constituents to seriously ponder over how they can collectively counter these challenges in the future.

Fewer victories in direct fights with BJP

That the Maharashtra outcome, which coincided with a more than favourable result for INDIA bloc partners JMM, Congress, RJD and CPI-ML in Jharkhand, has left the Grand Old Party rattled is obvious. So are the possible reasons for the frenzied rejection of the Maharashtra mandate.

The Maharashtra rout once again makes the Congress vulnerable to attacks over its inability to defeat the BJP in direct contests. The Congress faced a saffron party nominee in nearly 80 of the 102 seats it contested in Maharashtra but won just 11 of these. That’s hardly the reputation the Congress will want to keep lugging around if it wants to remain the central pole of the INDIA bloc, especially when it is routinely ragged even by allies for being stuck in past glory instead of battling its current morass.

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Shot in the arm for BJP

Coming so close on the heels of the Haryana and Jammu setbacks, the Maharashtra results inject a new zeal in Modi, his BJP and the wider NDA coalition. The BJP will now increasingly dub the Lok Sabha stumble as an aberration and reassert the prime minister’s credentials of electoral invincibility while also calling out the Congress and INDIA bloc’s Lok Sabha tirade about the Constitution being under threat from Modi as being a “fake narrative”. The BJP’s hot-wired victory wagon will also deter any problematic allies of the NDA coalition from being unreasonable or too demanding.

With Parliament’s winter session commencing Monday, the added vigour that the Maharashtra results have given the BJP will help Modi and his shouting brigade in both Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha to stay on their unyielding offensive against the INDIA bloc MPs when they raise the issue of Gautam Adani’s recent indictment by US prosecutors in a bribery scandal. The Congress and its allies can also be certain that all their protestations against contentious legislations, such as the Waqf Bill, are unlikely to stall a reinvigorated BJP’s legislative agenda.

More ‘dynasty jibes’ in store for Congress

Modi too would be unsparing towards the Congress; keeping his most acerbic attacks focused at Lok Sabha Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi while routinely chiding INDIA partners for carrying the burden of a party that for them is nothing more than an electoral liability. With Priyanka Gandhi Vadra now elected as MP from Wayanad, all three members of the Nehru-Gandhi clan will be parliamentarians – Rahul and Priyanka in the Lok Sabha and their mother, Sonia Gandhi, in the Rajya Sabha – when the winter session convenes, making the BJP’s charge of Congress being a ‘family firm’ even more stinging and frequent.

Also read: Kerala by-poll results: No surprises, but huge blow to BJP’s aspirations

As such, there is ample for the Congress to worry about in the aftermath of the Maharashtra debacle. While the party may find the election results “inexplicable”, it would, arguably, not be as shocked by the aggressive political brickbats that come its way.

Does Congress have a course correction blueprint?

This then leads to the big question: whether the Congress truly grasps the full extent of the implications of its successive Assembly poll routs that have come within six months of the party notching up a tally of 99 seats in the Lok Sabha and showing green shoots of revival. More importantly, if it realises what lies ahead, does it have the will and vision to course-correct?

The Congress has done nothing since its Lok Sabha gains that would suggest it has an actionable blueprint to revitalise itself. The Congress’s legendary factional feuds are still as debilitating as before, as the Haryana results demonstrated. Its penchant for organisational inertia and electoral complacency played out to its detriment in Jammu, Maharashtra and even Jharkhand, where its 16-seat tally of Saturday was largely on account of Hemant Soren and the JMM’s efficient poll campaign.

Also read: Jharkhand: How fiery Soren beat divisive tactics, stole BJP's thunder

The party also needs to realise that Rahul’s ad nauseam assertions for the imperative of a caste census, the need to protect the Constitution and the growing challenges from spiralling unemployment and agrarian distress, while noble, can’t be a panacea for the Congress’s organisational deficiencies and electoral inefficiencies. Similarly, the party’s praxis of copy-pasting its poll guarantees from one assembly election manifesto to the other serve little purpose if its leadership, central or in states, can’t address issues that are endemic to individual states.

Rahul must shed BJY hangover, face realities

Perhaps, most of all, Rahul not only needs to get out of his Bharat Jodo Yatra hangover but also keep a safe distance from Congress courtiers who sycophantically assure him that the BJY had made him a mass leader who can singularly take on the collective might of Modi’s electioneering prowess and the BJP’s organisational and financial muscle.

Besides, if Rahul and the Congress wish to remain the glue that keeps the INDIA bloc together, they also need to start acting the part convincingly. The party took an inordinate amount of time to finalise its seat-sharing negotiations in Maharashtra, ostensibly because Rahul was either “unavailable” to sort out competing claims over certain constituencies or wasn’t happy with the tough bargaining by Shiv Sena-UBT and NCP-SP.

Then, throughout the Maharashtra and Jharkhand poll campaign, for reasons best known to him and his advisors, Rahul sank back into the mould of an occasional campaigner. Contrary to expectations, there were no ‘joint INDIA bloc rallies’ in either state, even though in Jharkhand the Congress expected Hemant Soren and Kalpana Soren to campaign for all its candidates in Rahul’s absence. In the several assembly bypolls that coincided with the Maharashtra and Jharkhand polls, the Congress rebuffed INDIA partners and potential allies in states like Rajasthan and Assam only to end up jeopardising its own victory prospects.

Also read: Maharashtra polls: Shinde, Fadnavis or Gadkari? BJP's tough task to pick next CM

Haryana, Jammu and now Maharashtra – that’s three warning bells for the Congress in two months and the sound has already drowned out the premature celebratory trumpets that the party was blowing just six months ago following the Lok Sabha results. With a revitalised BJP now eager to avenge the partial setback it suffered in June, the Congress can either get its act together now or steadily sink back into the electoral atrophy that had inflicted it for the past decade.