Is Congress Struggling for Revival After BJP’s Thumping Victory?

As India gave Prime Minister Narendra Modi a historic mandate with the ruling NDA returning to power, the Congress is down to 52 members in the parliament this time. Of the 421 seats contested by the grand old party, it lost 369. How can the Congress be revived and what is the way forward?

In a conversation with BloombergQuint’s Harsha Subramaniam, Congress leader Shashi Tharoor who bucked his party’s trend and won from Thiruvanathapuram by a handsome margin, said the outcome was unforeseen and the party is in a “stage of shock.”

“No political pundit predicted this until the exit polls came out. We were looking at a whole range of predictions, we were working on our own calculations on the basis of ground reports. The expectation was very much that the BJP might peak somewhere around the 180-200 range.”

Shashi Tharoor, Congress Leader

Pointing at the BJP’s various policy blunders which resulted in economic failures, the Congress leader, said one of the classic theories of politics that people vote in their economic self-interest went right out of the window.

While there is a 45-year-high of unemployment, unprecedented rise in farmer suicides, destruction of SMEs due to demonetisation, yet the victims of the economic missteps still went ahead and voted for the BJP.

Further, Tharoor said the outcome needs a detailed study to unearth what went wrong for the grand old party and what the BJP did right.

‘Limited Appeal of Hindutva in Kerala, TN & Punjab’

Talking about how nearly two-thirds of the Congress MPs come from three states – Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Punjab, Tharoor said the limited appeal of Hindutva and the effective party organisations played a key role in securing these states.

“Kerala where there is a 45 percent non-Hindu population, Punjab where it is more than 50 percent of non-Hindu population and Tamil Nadu where there’s a complicated tradition of including atheism, of rationalism...all of which significantly limited the appeal of the ‘Hindi’, ‘Hindutva’, ‘Hindustan’ kind of approach. Another factor is that we had a strong and effective party organisations in these states,” Tharoor said.