Of late it hasn’t been easy to use the words ‘Congress’ and ‘optimism’ in the same breath, but this may be changing. As the countdown to the 2019 general election begins, it’s hard not to notice that tails are up among the party faithful.

For starters, the one-two punch of last year’s madcap demonetisation and this year’s torturous rollout of the goods and services tax has taken the sheen off Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s once vaunted reputation as an economic administrator. As growth sputters, and jobs fail to materialise, it’s increasingly clear that those who expected Modi to boost the economy with a jolt of free market energy were guilty of expecting too much.

Last week, Congress won a whopping victory (by nearly 200,000 votes) in a by-election for the erstwhile BJP stronghold of Gurdaspur in Punjab. On campuses nationwide, students are shunning the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s student wing. Media reports suggest that Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi is even managing to attract crowds in the prime minister’s bailiwick of Gujarat.

Following a largely successful tour of the US, Gandhi shows signs of taking his job more seriously. His party’s social media team has suddenly discovered new spunk. Compared to the thuggish smear machine employed by BJP, on Twitter Congress comes across as witty without being vicious. Gandhi boasts a fraction of Modi’s followers, but in recent weeks the younger man has earned more retweets.

If you put yourself in the shoes of a diehard Congress supporter – the kind who looks back fondly on the economic genius of Indira Gandhi and believes that Rajiv Gandhi virtually invented the personal computer – the imminence of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty’s rightful restoration to the Delhi throne must appear obvious.

As the argument goes, Congress is India’s default party of governance. Voters may occasionally turn to some meretricious alternative, but eventually they always come home to the one party they can trust to wield power responsibly. This explains Indira Gandhi’s triumphant return in 1980, and Sonia Gandhi’s 2004 humbling of Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

Moreover, to put it mildly, Modi’s BJP has not exactly lived up to expectations. Not only is the economy misfiring; on cultural issues, the party appears to possess an inexhaustible supply of leaders who can’t open their mouths except to put a foot in it. In 2014, many people voted for a turbocharged economy and a leash on party hotheads. Instead they got demonetisation and Yogi Adityanath as Uttar Pradesh chief minister.

In India’s personality-centric discourse, speculation about Congress tends to focus on Rahul Gandhi’s apparent lack of political skills. But, for argument’s sake, let’s assume for a moment that Gandhi manages to transform himself from WhatsApp joke to viable politician. (Stranger things have happened.) Let’s say he finally figures out whether he wants to be bearded or clean-shaven, stops disappearing on mysterious foreign jaunts every few months, and sharpens his stump speech.

Would this be enough to make Congress viable again? Or does it also need to rethink its ideas in order to reclaim power? Arguably, this is the single most important question that the party faces in the run up to the 2019 election.

Of course, you can’t entirely rule out the natural restoration narrative. Imagine an electorate impatient with jobless growth and alarmed by an assault on civil liberties – BJP leaders responding to news stories with massive lawsuits may not be the wisest move – entering voting booths with a determination to “throw the bums out.” In 2015, something similar happened next door in Sri Lanka, where a ragtag coalition ousted President Mahinda Rajapaksa, a charismatic nationalist once seen as unbeatable.

If I had to bet, however, I would bet against such an outcome. In my view, Modi’s 2014 election represents more than just a charismatic challenger routing a weary and scandal-tarred incumbent. In cultural terms, it represents a conservative turn in Hindu society.

Two years ago, political theorist Michael Walzer published a slim book that compares the post-Independence trajectories of India, Israel and Algeria. Walzer argues that the Westernised secular elites who most deeply shaped their countries’ post-independence nationalism – Jawaharlal Nehru, David Ben Gurion and Frantz Fanon – failed to reckon with the religiosity of their own people. In each of these countries, to varying degrees, secularists find themselves on the backfoot amidst a rising tide of religious nationalism.

To this list we could add Turkey, where Recep Erdogan has used Islamism as a battering ram against Kemalist secularism. If a similar process is indeed underway in India, it puts Congress on the wrong side of a host of hot-button cultural issues – from the quest for a uniform civil code to the campaign to build a Ram temple in Ayodhya. With much of the media on its side, for the first time BJP has the wherewithal to place these issues front and centre in national discourse.

I bounced this thesis, recently, off a young Congress politician. This person agreed, and added that the party “is seen by many people as the party of minorities.” In the current environment this signals trouble for Congress. It will take more than a few blunders by Modi, and a handful of token temple visits by Rahul Gandhi, to lead the party back to where it thinks it belongs.