DHAKA, Bangladesh – Defeat is usually an orphan, but the election debacle of Congress, India’s ruling party, in Uttar Pradesh on Tuesday has a clear patrimony: pandering to the state’s 36 million Muslims.

Pankaj Nangia/Associated Press

Under the leadership of political scion Rahul Gandhi, the son and grandson of assassinated prime ministers, the Congress party offered a platter of tangible and symbolic offerings to Muslims in the hope of turning them away from the state’s two biggest parties. It proposed job quotas to low-caste Muslims and worked to prevent the author Salman Rushdie from attending a literary festival in Jaipur.

But after more than 20 years in the political wilderness in India’s most populous state and months of hype that a reversal was at hand, Congress woke up Tuesday to find Uttar Pradesh had passed it by. The star power of Rahul Gandhi and his sister Priyanka Vadra had produced massive crowds but few votes. And toying with the state’s volatile balance of quotas and identity politics had brought a nasty blowback.



The regional Samajwadi Party won by a landslide. Congress took a dismal fourth, winning just 28 of the 403 seats in the Uttar Pradesh assembly. Muslim voters seemed less taken by the Congress party’s entreaties than fearful of a backlash by Hindu nationalists against Congress’s very offerings, and they fled into the arms of the Samajwadi Party.

Don’t just take my word for this. Here’s Uttar Pradesh’s outgoing chief minister, Kumari Mayawati: “There was a fear in the Muslim community that the B.J.P. may come to power,” she told reporters Wednesday, referring to the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. And “finding the Congress weak,” she said, “Muslims voted not for the Congress but the S.P.” (Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Partylost 126 of its 206 assembly seats after a term marked by fantastic corruption and waste.)

A Congress political operative I spoke with on Wednesday put the problem this way: “We came too strong with our campaign to Muslims, and they went to Samajwadi in search of some protection from communal elements.”

Congress was supposed to be the party that transcends narrow caste, religious and parochial interests, but in his campaign Gandhi appealed to distinct communities of voters across the state. Clearly, not everyone was buying. As a Muslim politician from the eastern part of the state said to me last month, “If they think they’re fooling anyone, they’re fooling themselves.”

Congress was tone-deaf, perhaps not having realized the electorate has changed. “Our voter is no longer confused,” an editorial in the Indian Express noted. “Nor is she a prisoner of narrow-focus prejudices and loyalties.”

And so despite a reputation for lawlessness and parochialism, the Samajwadi Party, a 20-year—old socialist party founded by a former wrestler, won in every region across the state and now enjoys a broad mandate. In recent years, it advocated removing computers from government offices to increase employment. This time around, it promised a free wireless tablet to teenagers who do well in school — one of many expensive giveaways it will now have to make good on.

It’s a big loss for Congress. Had the party’s dreams come true in Uttar Pradesh, the anemic coalition it leads in New Delhi would have been invigorated. The Samajwadi Party might support it in the national Parliament, but surely only on terms set by the party leader Mulayam Singh Yadav and his 38-year-old Australian-educated son, Akhilesh, one of whom will become Uttar Pradesh’s next chief minister.

The Congress party’s shellacking extended beyond Muslim voters, and beyond the state’s borders. The party lost all five of the assembly seats in the parliamentary constituency of party president Sonia Gandhi. It also lost races in the states of Punjab and Goa.

When exit polls suggested that Congress was in for disappointment, top leaders refused to hear. “These polls are not correct,” the party mandarin Digvijay Singh told reporters earlier this week. “Wait for the real results. We are sure to get 125-plus seats.”

The Congress party may have assumed that its surprise return to national power in 2004 and its even stronger reelection in 2009 had set the stage for greater heights in 2012. On Tuesday, voters in the heartland state of Uttar Pradesh appear to have told it, mediocre is as high as you go.