Congress | A crisis of identity

By the time results from five state elections began pouring in on May 4, the Congress had been left smaller, more southern and more Muslim in its political profile than at any point in its history. The verdicts sharpened a fear long haunting the Congress: that its national footprint is steadily narrowing even as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) argues that the Grand Old Party no longer speaks for a broad cross-section of India.

In Assam, the Congress was reduced to 19 MLAs, its worst-ever tally, while its projected ‘face’, Gaurav Gogoi, lost from Jorhat. In West Bengal, where it had drawn a blank in 2021, it returned with just two seats. In Tamil Nadu, the party fell from 18 MLAs to five. Its rapid post-poll shift from the old ally Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) to Vijay’s Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK)—sealed by party leader Rahul Gandhi’s presence at the swearing-in—looked less like strategic agility than an admission that the original alliance call had failed. In Puducherry, too, the Congress-DMK alliance could not prevent the National Democratic Alliance’s second successive victory.

Kerala provided the lone bright spot. Along with its partners in the United Democratic Front (UDF), the Congress secured an impressive 102 of the 140 seats. Yet even that victory underlined a larger reality: the Congress now draws most of its governing strength from the South. It rules on its own in three of the five southern states—Karnataka, Telangana and, now, Kerala—and remains a junior ally in Tamil Nadu. In the North, it governs only Himachal Pradesh and has a foothold in Jharkhand as part of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha-led mahagathbandhan.

Overall, the Congress is struggling to counter the BJP’s assertion that it is becoming not just a regional party, but increasingly one dominated by Muslim representation. In Assam, 18 of its 19 MLAs are Muslims, all elected from Muslim-majority seats. In Bengal, both its winners are Muslims from Murshidabad. In Kerala, of the UDF’s 102 MLAs, 30 are Muslims and 29 Christians, a composition the BJP is already framing as “minority rule” to prise Hindus away from the secular bloc. In Tamil Nadu, the Congress’s five MLAs include three Christians, one Muslim and one Dalit, with no upper-caste Hindu representation. The Congress disputes this reading, pointing out that 78 per cent of its 664 MLAs across India are Hindus and only 12 per cent Muslims.

THE PERCEPTION PROBLEM

The perception, however, cuts deeper. The Congress itself acknowledged this after its 2014 Lok Sabha defeat, when the A.K. Antony committee identified the party’s “pro-Muslim” image as a major problem. The charge, of course, was not new; versions of it had long been advanced by the Sangh Parivar, dating back to the days of Jawaharlal Nehru. What changed after 2014, says political scientist Rahul Verma, was its electoral potency. As the BJP increasingly turned state elections into bipolar contests, the Muslim vote—once considered a tactical advantage in fragmented coalition politics—began to carry a political cost for the Congress, driving Hindu consolidation around a perception cultivated over two decades.

The pattern is visible in the five states with the highest Muslim population shares: Assam, West Bengal, Kerala, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The Congress is in power only in Kerala; the BJP or its allies govern the other four. Kerala could become the BJP’s next laboratory, with the party’s gradual organisational expansion beginning to resemble its earlier groundwork in Assam and Bengal. The recent tussle over Kerala’s chief ministership may deepen that perception. Congress insiders say the high command favoured K. C. Venugopal, the AICC general secretary for organisation, but the Indian Union Muslim League used its leverage to block the move, signalling that if Venugopal were anointed CM, it could be less supportive in future elections, including for Rahul or Priyanka Gandhi in Wayanad.

Yashwant Deshmukh, founder-director of the polling agency C-Voter, says the episode reflects how dependent the Congress in Kerala has become on a Muslim ally, to the point where even routine personnel decisions are constrained. That dependence, he argues, may deepen as the BJP attempts to push Kerala towards its own “Bengal moment”. Political analyst Yogendra Yadav rejects that interpretation. “It is a classic case of spin doctoring to suggest that the BJP is gaining because minorities are consolidating around the Congress or other Opposition parties. The cause-and-effect relationship works the other way around,” he says. “The BJP’s relentless assault on minorities, especially Muslims, leaves them with no option but to back non-BJP parties. This is exactly what the BJP wants as it can then create the scare of Muslim consolidation among Hindus.”

Congress insiders insist that Hindu-Muslim polarisation is not why they are losing. The real problem, they say, is that, unlike the BJP, which has refined electioneering into a fine art and science, the Congress struggles to project even basic organisational solidity. Both party president Mallikarjun Kharge and organisational secretary K.C. Venugopal are from the South and, critics within the party argue, have little grasp of north India.

LACK OF ACCOUNTABILITY

Nor does the party have any meaningful system of accountability. Jitendra Singh remained AICC general secretary in charge of Assam for nearly a decade despite, in the view of one senior leader, lacking the ability to organise campaigns, build cohesion, deploy resources or shape narratives. When Krishna Allavaru, a management consultant-turned-politician, was sent to Bihar to manage the Congress campaign last year, he acknowledged after the defeat that the assignment was outside his experience. The party changed the in-charge, appointed a Dalit state president, Rajesh Kumar, and still did not ask either for a plan of action or carry out any structured review.

A pattern runs through the Congress’s operational failures: nobody seems to know who decides what. Kharge steps in only on the biggest questions. In Tamil Nadu, he prevailed over Rahul, who wanted to strike a pre-poll alliance with the TVK. Then, there is the tendency of Rahul, Priyanka and Sonia Gandhi to intervene when they want to, not always when the party needs them to. On most organisational matters, the final call thus rests with Venugopal, sometimes because the principals are not speaking directly to one another.

Delay is another recurring problem. “If I had to compress every operational problem in the Congress into one sentence, it would be this: we sit on decisions,” says a senior leader. In Kerala, the high command could have told Venugopal months earlier either to contest as the CM face or accept he was out of the race. Instead, the issue drifted until it became a public embarrassment. In Assam, the decision to make Gaurav Gogoi state Congress chief was delayed by at least a year. In Punjab, one of next year’s key state elections, no strategic meeting has taken place despite repeated reminders. The party has yet to decide whether state president Amarinder Singh Raja Warring or former CM Charanjit Singh Channi should lead. In Uttarakhand, widely seen as low-hanging fruit because anti-incumbency against the BJP is high, Harish Rawat remains the Congress leader with the best approval ratings, yet Rahul has not met him in two years.

THE RAHUL PARADOX

With power still largely vested in the Gandhi family, many Congress leaders want Rahul to fast-track decisions instead of leaving them to Venugopal or Kharge. One leader says Rahul’s approach swings sharply: at times, he appears eager to drive change; at others, he procrastinates, costing the party valuable time. A general secretary in-charge says Rahul replies to messages within 20 minutes and moves quickly when decisions do not require the party machinery. But once the organisation is involved, he tends to wait for consensus. A leader cites an example from the summer of 2025, when Rahul, having just moved into his bungalow as leader of the Opposition, was discussing where to hang a painting as Venugopal walked in to discuss appointing a new Congress chief for a key western state. Rahul initially approved the suggestion with a casual “Yes, yes, do it”, but then asked Venugopal to consult state leaders and obtain Kharge’s approval as well.

Rahul’s supporters describe this as decentralisation. Critics within the party see it differently. No organisation, one leader says, functions through pure decentralisation unless the top leader is an obsessive micromanager or someone below is fully empowered to act. Rahul, he argues, does neither.

Instead, he enjoys shaping narratives—from the caste census to the Great Nicobar issue—but avoids electoral mechanics: candidates, strategy, resources and mobilisation. “Rahul is not a political animal in the conventional Indian sense,” says one senior leader. “He is not thinking 24x7 about who to send where, who to remove, who to install.” Elections, the leader says, do not excite Rahul; he would rather read a book or meet and discuss geopolitics with international figures.

On narrative and ideology too, the party appears heavy-footed. Several Congress leaders point to growing online anger against Prime Minister Narendra Modi after economic strain linked to the US-Iran war. They say the resentment is concentrated among middle-class voters, driven by fuel prices, economic stress and governance fatigue. Yet this is also the segment the Congress has virtually forgotten. Its focus remains on the bottom of the pyramid, but that support does not consolidate quickly. One leader from south India notes that the party has lost 90 per cent of Dalit seats since Kharge, himself a Dalit, became president. Meanwhile, Shashi Tharoor and Sachin Pilot—the party’s two faces who appeal to the middle class—remain sidelined or underused.

Verma argues the Congress cannot resolve its crisis through short-term gestures such as yatras, temple visits or calibrated messaging. Its deeper challenge is to reimagine secular-plural politics for an India where majoritarian sentiment has become a potent electoral force that cannot be dismissed merely as prejudice. To recover, he says, the party must understand why that sentiment has grown, what anxieties drive it and where its own secular tradition has failed. Without that rethinking, symbolic gestures will not change the arithmetic.

The Congress crisis, then, is not only about leadership, ideology, alliances or Hindu-Muslim perceptions. It is about the absence of an operating centre that can turn intent into execution. Rahul has given the party themes, but themes do not select candidates, settle factions, review states, move resources or build winning campaigns. Unless the Congress decides that who decides—and decides quickly—May 4 may prove not the floor from which it rises, but the ceiling it cannot cross.