Lost: The Unstoppable Decline of Congress

 FOR THE BHARATIYA JANATA PARTY’S (BJP) ELECTION STRATEGISTS, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi long ago ceased to be a rival capable of offering real competition. What still puzzles them, however, is what they describe as an erosion of reason around him. “Defeat can jolt a person into confronting harsh realities. A string of setbacks can leave an opponent crestfallen, but it can also compel him to craft coherent strategies by learning from past mistakes,” one strategist says, adding that such qualities are conspicuously absent in Rahul Gandhi. Surrounded, in their view, by lightweight leaders, pedagogic academics and obliging yes-men, he repeatedly fails to acknowledge the truth.

The recent drubbing in Bihar was no exception, they argue. The Nehru family scion was not only reportedly surprised by the outcome but insisted the election had been unfair from the outset. To them, this refusal to accept a resounding electoral setback is not an exercise in unlearning or a step towards re­learning. It signals something else entirely: a political denial bordering on schizophrenia—or worse, a declaration of war on common sense.

Gad Saad is a Beirut-born Canadian marketing professor who uses evolutionary psychology to understand behaviour and people’s habits. Drawing on a study on rodents infected with toxoplasmosis which reduces their aversion to cat urine and fear of the predator, he deduced that such harmful ideas— which he calls “idea pathogens”—kill rational thinking and discretion. In the case of rats, this infection makes them easy prey for cats because it simply makes them develop an affinity towards embracing danger. Saad’s theories, it seems, can explain away Gandhi Jr’s predisposition towards fighting a losing battle even as his party gets decimated to the extent of near-death by a formidable opponent. The sad plight of his party in the three states it is in power also seems lost on him, reinforcing the belief that the so-called contender is far from being one.

Now, Rahul Gandhi has a knack for allowing himself to be in­fluenced by any academic or expert he encounters, even though any politician would place his bets on institutional memory when it comes to what he wants to hear. Politicians, by force of habit, want to hear the bad news first, notwithstanding their eu­phoric posturing and rhetoric from amidst the adoring masses.

Take for instance Yogendra Yadav who has been perpetual­ly seeking a political opportunity and could put up a political tent thanks to Rahul Gandhi in the run-up to the Bihar polls. Gandhi Jr fell hook, line and sinker for Yadav’s proposition that the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Bihar was flawed. He wrote and posted comments on X ahead of the two-phased Bihar state election: “Now that Bihar’s final voters’ list is out, it’s time to audit the SIR. It makes for sad reading. Despite the Supreme Court’s timely intervention that prevented mass disenfranchisement, the exercise has left much to be desired in terms of completeness, equity and accuracy. Bihar should have had 8.22 crore voters—the final rolls show 7.42 crore. Nearly 80 lakh citizens are missing. Women’s representation has fallen again; Muslims faced excess exclusions. Far from ‘purification,’ the rolls contain gibberish names, duplicates and invalid entries. Worse, the process has been marked by secrecy, haste and defi­ance of the Election Commission’s own manual. An institution once trusted across the Global South now stands diminished. Replicating this SIR elsewhere could open the floodgates to disenfranchisement—and hasten the backsliding of India’s electoral democracy.”

Although Rahul Gandhi did not read the writing on the wall after the polls, Yadav was quicker to recalibrate. He opined that “Bihar was a dry run” and that the SIR was crafted chiefly with West Bengal in mind. “BJP wants to use the ECI to delete millions of names who may not vote for it. Spoke on this grave concern at the Kolkata Press Club and called for public vigil on SIR,” he posted on X after a November 24 press meet. Shifting the goal­posts away from Bihar, where Congress and the rest of the Grand Alliance suffered a rout, Yadav attempted to position himself on the right side of the argument, at least in hindsight. West Bengal, he warned, with elections due next year, would witness “the largest disenfranchisement in the history of India, perhaps even in the history of the world”. Gandhi Jr, lacking Yadav’s nuance and instinct for political manoeuvre, stuck to the line that the Bihar elections were unfair even before they began, despite the National Democratic Alliance’s (NDA) commanding social base making the outcome all but predetermined.

Analysts have pointed out that, in Bihar, Rahul Gandhi mis­judged the mood by harping on “vote chori” and SIR, which even­tually did not capture the public imagination. Instead of shifting tactics, he went ahead with slogans that did not strike a chord, as he did five years earlier with Rafale. While he squandered away an opportunity to raise bread-and-butter issues, his aggressive posturing also forced ally and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader Tejashwi Yadav to ape Rahul Gandhi—in addition to the burden of having to counter “Jungle Raj” allegations against the Yadav family’s rule in the state in the past. Surprisingly, not a single complaint about voting irregularities was filed by the grand al­liance with the Election Commission (EC) despite the tall claims made by Gandhi Jr.

RELYING ON WRONG advisers has landed Rahul Gandhi in a soup for far too long, and yet he keeps hopping from one to another.

Among those who have his ear are journalist-turned-Congress politician Kumar Ketkar, who, lately, seems to have developed a fondness for making outlandish claims without any evidence to support them. He alleged recently that the CIA and Mossad had conspired to defeat Congress in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. His argument was that Congress, which had won 145 seats in the 2004 Lok Sabha polls and 206 seats in 2009, should have won 250 seats and retained power in 2014, the year Narendra Modi led BJP to an emphatic win and Congress won only 44 seats, its lowest-ever tally. Ketkar said at an event, “It was then that the game started. It was decided that under no circum­stances, the seat tally of the Congress should increase from 206 in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.” He is of the view that the intelligence agencies of the US and Israel realised that when Congress is in power, their games wouldn’t click in India.

Gandhi Jr has relied on a pool of advisers either trying a game of political entrepreneurship in the hope that Congress might return to power, or those whose credentials are suspect. They included Sam Pitroda and obedient foot soldiers like Jairam Ramesh, Pawan Khera, and others whose stubbornness not to engage more worldly wise and able leaders stood in the way of any bid to revitalise the party. Former Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor and economist Raghuram Rajan, who had veered towards Congress following his exit as central banker, has now distanced himself from the Grand Old Party—he no longer makes public appearances with Rahul Gandhi.

Open had earlier looked at Gandhi Jr’s leadership failure through the lens of Nobel Prize-winning economist Richard Thaler’s concept of the “sunk cost fallacy”. In economic terms, this proposition, made by Thaler in 1980, refers to the tendency to throw good money after bad. More broadly, it de­scribes a cognitive bias that compels individuals to continue investing in unviable or impractical decisions simply because they have already committed time, effort, or resources to them. Often, this persistence is driven by incorrigibly irrational be­haviour, including stubbornness, preconceived notions, or an unwillingness to admit error, traits rarely found in consistently successful people (‘The Redundant Gandhi’, Open, June 23, 2025).

Congress insiders say that leaders such as Sachin Rao, Meenakshi Natarajan, Krishna Allavaru and so on enjoy tremendous clout within the inner circle of Rahul Gandhi along with KC Venugopal, who is considered by many Congress leaders to be inefficient and clueless when it comes to running the or­ganisation. As party general secretary in charge of organisations, Venugopal has earned criticism from within for inept handling of seat allocations and mismanaging internecine wrangling. Due to his poor understanding of North Indian politics, he is seen as a wrong choice for the post, notwithstanding Rahul Gandhi reposing faith in him.

That sober comments came from a leader of the stature of P Chidambaram after the Bihar reversal did not force the Con­gress high command to a rethink on strategy. Chidambaram wrote in a column after the polls that “Mr Narendra Modi has an instant connect with the electorate; Mr Rahul Gandhi stuck to his main themes of vote chori (vote theft) and unemployment; and so on and so forth”. He also found fault with the party organ­isation for the electoral defeat, apparently placing the blame on the man who handles organisation and the man who endorses his being in that position.

For her part, Congress functionary and daughter of the late Congress stalwart Ahmed Patel used the opportunity to air her frustrations at the way the organisation is being run. “No ex­cuses, no blame game, no introspection, it’s time to look within and accept reality. Till when will countless loyal ground work­ers who have stayed with the party through thick and thin… wait to see success… instead it’s failure after failure due to power concentrated in the hands of few who are totally disconnected with ground reality and are responsible for the misery and rout of the grand old party time and again,” Mumtaz Patel wrote on X. That the targets were Venugopal and his mentors in the party is anyone’s guess because these leaders close to Gandhi thrived on keeping the old guard as well as promising young leaders away from the so-called high command.

THE TYRANNY OF this largely “unknown brigade”, which also includes names like Sasikanth Senthil and others in the election management committee known to be headed by Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, also means the high com­mand is low on good feedback and therefore ends up lapping up topics that do not click, and very often boomerang on the party. Open had written about one such poll-time preoccupation of Rahul Gandhi—his tirade against industrialist Gautam Adani. The Congress leader, who kept brandishing the map of the redevelopment plan of Mumbai’s Dharavi slum at rallies in Maharashtra late last year, did not even do his homework well enough to know that the contract was given to Adani during the tenure of the previous Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) state government in which Congress was a partner. The Congress campaign against the Gujarati businessman was immediately called out for duplicity by rivals and, in the process, Rahul Gandhi cut a sorry figure, appearing out of his depth (‘The Nowhere Alliance’, Open, December 9, 2024).

Rahul Gandhi has continued his rants against Adani. In fact, he had routinely accused the Modi government of directing the Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) to invest in Adani Group, despite LIC refuting the charges. The accusation grew shrill after a Washington Post report. In Lok Sabha on December 1, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman dismissed such claims, saying LIC’s investment decisions are governed by provisions of the Insurance Act, 1938 as well as regulations issued by the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IR­DAI), RBI, and the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) from time to time. She added in reply to a question, “Ministry of Finance does not issue any advisory/direction to LIC in connec­tion with matters related to investment of LIC.”

The Washington Post alleged that Indian government officials from the finance ministry and Department of Financial Services drafted and fast-tracked a proposal to channel approximately $3.9 billion (₹32,000 crore) from LIC into Adani Group com­panies. Sitharaman also said that LIC’s exposure to the Adani Group remains less than 2 per cent of the conglomerate’s to­tal debt. Interestingly, LIC says it has independently opted to invest around ₹31,000 crore in Adani firms, which has since doubled in value. Yet Rahul Gandhi continues to bring up the issue, clearly not finding many takers. Ironically, he also tried to cling to US President Donald Trump calling India a “dead economy” to attack the government. Most of his statements of this kind have backfired thanks to Gandhi Jr’s own colleagues airing diagonally opposite views. Gandhi had said, “He (Trump) is right, everybody knows this except the prime minister and the finance minister. I am glad that President Trump has stated a fact.” Many of his own leaders disagreed with his backing of Trump’s preposterous remarks. Instead, they maintained that the Indian economy was robust because despite turmoil in other parts of the world, it was growing steadily. Again, his disparag­ing comments about the EC and other government institutions reveal that, despite his long apprenticeship in Indian politics, Gandhi Jr often falls short of the mature, calibrated responses expected of a seasoned politician. Following in his footsteps, younger leaders too are seen making irresponsible statements. For instance, in the ongoing Parliament session, Sitharaman dismissed the charge that the GST Compensation Cess was be­ing misused to repay the Centre’s own debt. She said, “I must express my serious objection to the observation that the Com­pensation Cess is being used to pay the Centre’s own debt… I cannot believe that a constitutional body… would allow me to use the Compensation Cess to pay the Central government’s debts,” she said, demanding that Sasikanth Senthil withdraw his “baseless allegation”.

News coming from the states where Congress is in power is disquieting too. Although Congress leaders from Telangana led by Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy paid a courtesy visit to Rahul Gandhi and praised him and party chief Mallikarjun Kharge for the win, the state unit is faction-ridden and the whole organ­isational apparatus is in disarray. Slow implementation of prom­ises has also put the state government in a bad spot. Ingratiating behaviour by Reddy after a bypoll win will not be enough to put the house in order.

In Himachal Pradesh, the party has not been successful in filling the organisational vacuum plaguing the state for many months. Equally distressing for the party is a bid to find cohesion between the government headed by Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu and the organisation being refurbished. No wonder, Vinod Kumar, who took charge recently as the new state unit president, faces an uphill task. He was quoted as saying that “this crown is full of challenges, the biggest being to bring the party workers out of their houses to work for the organisation”.

Less said the better about the Karnataka unit of Congress where the high command is grappling with growing tensions between Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and Karnataka Congress President and Deputy Chief Minister DK Shivakumar. The internal crisis has escalated with demands rising from a section of partymen that Shivakumar be immediately made chief minister, replacing Siddaramaiah. The power-sharing arrangement is still awaited as the plot gets thicker by the hour.

Apart from Congress losing the goodwill of its I.N.D.I.A. bloc partners because of its aggressive posturing—especially in states where the party is relatively insignificant and yet demands a large chunk of seats—in states such as Kerala, where there has been a glimmer of hope for the party to make a comeback in the elections due next year, infighting and scandals, including sexual harassment allega­tions against key leaders, have demoralised the rank and file.

Young legislator Rahul Mamkootathil, who has been expelled from Congress over complaints from his alleged victims, continues to embarrass the party with fresh com­plaints coming from survivors. Kerala Police have regis­tered an FIR against him for alleged rape and causing mis­carriage. To make matters worse, female Congress leaders themselves have either publicly or privately complained to the state leadership about the ordeal they had to suffer at the hands of Mamkootathil. That he enjoys the backing of Shafi Parambil, an influential MP and party leader, is believed to have helped Mamkootathil walk away with impunity for long.

While Rahul Mamkootathil’s predatory conduct has thrown Congress off the rails in Kerala, nationally it is the spread of idea pathogens—notions that obliterate common sense—that is driving Rahul Gandhi to cast his party to the wolves.