Friday, 17 May, 2024
Odisha is a testimony of how poor leadership choices have cost the Congress party dearly across the nation
Droupadi Murmu, a tribal leader from the Mayurbhanj district in Odisha, has been nominated as the BJP-NDA candidate for the post of the President in elections scheduled for July 18, 2022. Since she hails from Odisha, the chief minister of Odisha Naveen Patnaik who heads the regional party the BJD has publicly announced that the BJD will vote for Mrs Murmu. It more or less guarantees a victory and she is all set to become the first tribal female President of India. The Congress party, which had once won 117 out of 147 seats in the Odisha assembly, has decided to back Yashwant Sinha, former Union Minister in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government as he is the “unanimous” choice of the opposition parties. This single decision is an explainer on how the Congress is disconnected from ground realities. And how its growing irrelevance in Odisha will gather momentum. In a manner of speaking, Odisha is a testimony of how poor leadership choices have cost the Congress party dearly across the nation.
While the Congress dominated the politics of Odisha till the 1990s, it did lose elections once in a while since 1967 when Indian voters in many states decided to throw the Congress out of power. But as the accompanying charts indicate, the cataclysmic drop in the number of seats and the vote share of the Congress in this century is both sad and inexplicable. But there is a story behind the numbers that explains the decline and fall of the Congress in Odisha; and India. In 1980, fed up with the Janata Party experiment that collapsed under the weight of internal contradictions, voters in Odisha gave a big mandate to the Congress with 118 out of a total of 147 seats in the assembly and a vote share that almost touched 48%. The late J. B. Patnaik became the chief minister. Though both powerful and politically, Patnaik became quite unpopular in the state and there was rising discontent against him. But the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984 ensured that the Congress returned to power in Odisha in 1985 with a 51% vote share and 117 out of 147 seats.
But J. B. Patnaik remained unpopular and in the 1990 elections, the tallest politician of Odisha, the late Biju Patnaik who is the father of the current chief minister Naveen Patnaik, swept the polls reducing the Congress to just 10 seats and a 30% vote share. When elections became due again in 1995, Biju Patnaik was old and ailing. The Congress actually promised J. B. Patnaik was not the chief minister candidate of the party and came back to power with 80 seats and a vote share of 39%. That was the last time the Congress won elections in the state. As the charts show, both in terms of vote share and number of seats, there has been a precipitous drop. In the 2019 elections, the Congress almost withered away, managing a meagre 16% vote share and just 9 out of 147 seats. The BJP has already replaced it as the main opposition party in the state with a vote share of about 35%.
That just about sums the sorry spectacle of the Congress in Indian politics in this century; despite two terms leading the UPA at the centre.
