New Delhi, Oct. 16 -- Something is revealing about the arguments a political party chooses to make after losing an election. A party confident of its political instincts tends to ask what went wrong with its campaign, its candidates or its reading of the electorate. A party increasingly on the defensive may find itself asking a different question: was the contest itself fair? Both questions are legitimate. The trouble begins when the second becomes a substitute for the first.
That is the political dilemma facing Rahul Gandhi's Congress in the debate over the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. The difficulty for Gandhi is that the party's electoral decline began well before the current controversy. Union Home Minister Amit Shah has drawn attention to precisely this contradiction, pointing out that the current SIR exercise began only after 2024, while Congress's electoral troubles stretch back much further. His argument goes beyond partisan sparring to a more fundamental question for the Congress leadership: how much of its decline can it explain without examining its own political choices?
The geographical spread of the Congress's difficulties makes that question harder to avoid. The party failed to win a single seat in the recent by-elections in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry. In Gujarat, it has struggled to regain electoral ground, while Bihar and Uttar Pradesh have presented their own persistent challenges. Taking them together, Shah raised questions about the party's ability to remain electorally relevant across regions.
These are not interchangeable political arenas. Tamil Nadu has its own powerful Dravidian political traditions; Bihar and Uttar Pradesh have their distinct caste equations and regional leadership structures; West Bengal has a political history shaped by a different set of rivalries. The pattern raises a question that goes beyond any single election: has Congress lost the ability to adapt its politics to the states in which it seeks power?
A national opposition cannot live indefinitely on the politics of accusation.
Congress has invested heavily in a national narrative against the BJP, but the ability to sustain a political argument is not the same as the ability to build an electoral base. The party's repeated setbacks raise questions about whether its national messaging translates into political relevance at the state level, and whether its leadership has kept pace with changing local realities. Opposition to the ruling party may establish a political position; it does not automatically create a viable electoral alternative.
This is where Shah's emphasis on grassroots engagement becomes significant. His criticism points to a distinction often obscured by the prominence of national political campaigns: visibility is not the same as presence. Political support is not built only during election campaigns, nor can it be measured by the visibility of a leader in national debates. It depends on the less conspicuous work of maintaining contact with voters, understanding local concerns, and building an organisation that survives between elections. Press conferences can frame a political debate, but they cannot build a booth-level presence by themselves.
The BJP's performance in local elections offers a contrast. In the Gujarat civic contests, the party won 90 of the 104 seats contested across three municipal bodies, including 38 of 44 seats in Gandhinagar. Such results strengthen Shah's claim that organisational depth is crucial for any political party. Local victories do not guarantee future mandates, but they demonstrate the political value of a machinery capable of converting support into seats.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi's leadership and the BJP's ability to build local networks and adapt political messaging to different constituencies contribute to the BJP's electoral victories. For Congress, the challenge is not simply to oppose the BJP but to establish why voters should see it as a credible alternative. That requires more than a national campaign centred on Rahul Gandhi; it requires state leaders who command credibility, candidates who understand their constituencies and alliances that work beyond electoral arithmetic on paper.
Shah's call for introspection therefore raises a question Congress cannot answer merely by disputing the electoral process: what has the party learnt from its successive defeats? If it believes the SIR exercise has affected its performance, that claim must be assessed on evidence. But it must also account for the political weaknesses that predate the exercise and extend across states with markedly different electoral dynamics.
The distinction matters because opposition is not the same as an alternative. A party may be effective at challenging the government and still struggle to persuade voters that it is ready to govern. Congress's predicament lies in that gap between national opposition and state-level electoral strength.
The question facing Rahul Gandhi, then, is not simply how to explain the circumstances of defeat, but what the party has learnt from the defeats themselves. Amit Shah has framed the issue as a challenge to Congress's political approach, and its significance lies in the question that follows. No party can rebuild its electoral standing by treating every setback as an exception. Congress will have to do more than contest the rules of the game. It will have to demonstrate that it understands why voters have repeatedly chosen otherwise.
Views expressed are personal. The writer is a political analyst and columnist
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Millennium Post.