Five months after black Friday, it was a black Sunday for the Congress, with no one in the party quite sure how many dark days there are in store for the party.

Five months after black Friday, it was a black Sunday for the Congress, with no one in the party quite sure how many dark days there are in store for the party.

Before 19 October, the stock response of any Congress leader about the impact of a defeat in the Maharashtra and Haryana assembly polls was that things could not get any worse after the May 16 Lok Sabha results gave them only 44 seats. But Sunday, as it turned out, showed that things could indeed take a turn for the worse.

Even though a Congress defeat in both states was anticipated, it is the virtual wipeout in Haryana and the severe drubbing it got in Maharashtra that threatens to compound the party’s unending woes.

Pushed to the margins

After a decade in power in Haryana, the party was not even left with the face-saver of being able to claim the position of Leader of Opposition which belongs to the largest party with 10 percent of the seats in the House.

That honour has been wrested by the INLD whose leader Om Prakash Chautala has been convicted in the teachers’ recruitment scam and is presently in jail. The Congress is a distant third in the state where the BJP rode the Narendra Modi wave to capture power on its own for the first time.

It’s a similar story in Maharashtra. The party faced the ignominy of not only being behind the BJP, which has emerged as the single largest party, but also the Shiv Sena. And it only managed to come neck to neck both in terms of seats and vote share with its former alliance partner, the NCP.

And if Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena plays hard to get and sticks to its misplaced claim for the chief minister’s post---when it only has half of the seats won by the BJP---the party may also be deprived of the leader of opposition post in the cash-rich western state.

After its defeats in Maharashtra and Haryana, the Congress is not even a regional force in these states having been overtaken by other parties. It is now in power in nine states. But look at the states it is ruling---Karnataka and Kerala, the biggest states it presently has in its kitty, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Mizoram, Meghalaya and Manipur.

Together these states account for a mere 78 Lok Sabha seats, that is, around one-seventh of the total number of parliamentary seats in the country. The picture that emerges is that the party’s footprints are gradually being erased by regional parties and the BJP in large swathes of India as a gleeful Narendra Modi moves towards his objective of setting up a Congress-Mukt Bharat.

If that is not enough to set the alarms ringing at 10 Janpath, here is another fact that is staring Congress President Sonia Gandhi in the face.

Its recent history would show that the Congress has never managed to recoup its losses or revive itself in states where it has been overtaken by other parties and relegated into a third or fourth place.

The examples of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal are already before it. And if Maharashtra, Haryana and Andhra Pradesh--where the TDP and YSR Congress of Jagan Mohan Reddy are the ruling party and the main opposition---get added to the list, the future is bleak for the party which was once the only dominant pole in Indian politics.

Presently, the Congress, which drew a blank in as many as 19 states and UTs during the Lok Sabha polls, has only 10 leaders of opposition including in small states like Goa, Nagaland, Tripura and slightly bigger ones on like Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chattisgarh, Gujarat, Odisha and Punjab. In many of these states it made it to that position only by the skin of its teeth.

Take the case of Rajasthan where the party has 21 seats in the 200 member assembly or 16 seats in the 121 member house in Odisha. It is nowhere in the picture in states like UP and Bihar which account for 120 Lok Sabha seats.

To add to its woes, the party’s vote share has declined both in Maharashtra and Haryana, keeping in line with the national elections. In the Lok Sabha, it fell alarmingly below the 20 percent danger mark. And if the impression that the party, whose history was synonymous with India’s, is now a spent force grows, it could lose even in the states which have stood by it.

After all, if even Andhra Pradesh, which helped the UPA come to power twice at the Centre, abandoned it for the TDP and Jagan Mohan Reddy’s outfit, the northeast states could also break away in favour of the party ruling at the Centre.

Politics of escapism

But ostrich-like, the Congress has been burying its head in the sand, hoping that time would dilute the crisis before it.

It had four to five months to signal that it has drawn some lessons from the Lok Sabha defeat and would take some corrective measures, but it did no such thing.

Even now, instead of worrying over its losses or introspecting on why its fortunes have been hurtling downhill all this while or going in for urgent reparative steps, it has sought to explain away its defeat to its 15 and 10 years of incumbency respectively in Maharashtra and Haryana---never mind that some of its own governments or that of the BJP have defied this trend.

And afraid that Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi may once again be blamed for any defeat, both Sonia and her son made a token presence in the campaign, leaving it to the state leadership to bear the burden. It is another matter that the contesting candidates were not keen to have Rahul as their campaigner.

To cover up for the fact that the central leadership had abandoned the two states, the Congress slammed Modi for campaigning in a manner that no prime minister has done before him and is trying to draw consolation from the fact that the "so-called" Modi wave failed to fetch a majority for the BJP in Maharashtra and is facing a recalcitrant Shiv Sena which is playing hard to get.

But it is quite overlooking the possibility that the Congress’s own former alliance partner, the NCP is likely to flex its muscles in the coming days in more ways than one.

And if its offer of outside support is accepted by the BJP the Congress would lose out the LoP status to the Shiv Sena. And if Sharad Pawar’s party remains in the opposition, it would provide stiff competition to the Congress in living up to that role so that it can protect its identity and safeguard its future by squeezing out Sonia’s party or whatever is left of it in Maharashtra.

The Congress has seen this happening in the Lok Sabha where the AIADMK and the Trinamool Congress--- which with 37 and 34 seats on are only a shade behind it—have often been trying to outdo the Congress as an opposition party.

Desperate cries of ‘Priyanka lao’

With 67- year old Sonia keeping none too well, the future appears to be menacing and dark for party workers who are wary of being led by Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi who has failed to inspire them, let alone the voters or the masses, and has ended up alienating the old guard which had stood by Sonia since she entered active politics 15 years back.

It is not surprising therefore that the demand is once again being raised for Priyanka Vadra to enter active politics and steer the organization. This is notwithstanding the denial she issued in the face of an all out attack on her brother over the Lok Sabha debacle and slogans pleading to her to save the party from a certain doom.

The desperation behind the slogan is visible even if she has no magic wand to revive the party that has been slowly fading away in key states.

Her own track record is a mixed one given the fact that her role until now has been to ensure a comfortable victory for her mother and brother in Rae Bareli and Amethi parliamentary constituencies. But when it came to the assembly elections, even she failed to deliver for the party. The Congress could win only two out of the 10 assembly segments in these two parliamentary seats.

But party workers see in her their only hope at present.

Although some leaders had directly attacked Rahul for his ineffective leadership during the assembly and Lok Sabha campaigns, most Congressmen are aware of two things---one, that the Gandhi family stands united against any onslaught on their leadership and two, that their future, good or bad is hitched to the Gandhi name even if the leadership it provides is insipid.

Knowing that there is no way they can have a Congress without Rahul, there has been a renewed call to Priyanka to step forward and lend a helping hand so that a triad of Priyanka-Sonia-Rahul in that order steers the party lead the party.

With the party president’s elections coming up in mid-2015, the demand is expected to gather steam if for no other reason but to ensure that Sonia remains at the helm and does not foist Rahul on them.

Priyanka or not, for the 129-old party, any prospect of a political diwali now seems like a fantasy