India, May 21 -- Indian politics has a cruel way of exposing weakness. It does not merely punish defeat; it punishes indecision, hesitation, and the inability to learn from repeated mistakes. That is precisely where the Congress party finds itself today.

There is an old political saying that parties in decline eventually learn how to lose. Over the past decade, the Congress seems to have turned that lesson into routine practice. The tragedy for the party is that many of these defeats are not inevitable. Often, the Congress enters contests with enough political space, public dissatisfaction against its opponents, and organisational presence to remain competitive. Yet, time and again, it fails to cross the final hurdle. The examples are ma...