Odisha polls: Once a powerhouse, the Congress is now a faceless entity in the state

What is wrong with the Congress? For one last time, I thought of asking that question just as the party had to bite the dust in yet another election – the panchayat polls in Odisha. According of the unofficial results, the Congress won just 66 of the 849 zilla parishad seats where elections were held, while the BJP saw its tally grow nearly 9-fold from 36 in the last elections to 306, riding on the growing dissatisfaction against chief minister Naveen Patnaik’s Biju Janata Dal.

The BJD still won the majority of seats, but with a narrower margin compared to 2012 when it had won 651 seats.

Last week, I wrote about how the BJP catapulted itself from a marginal player in Odisha’s politics to taking the effective space of principal opposition. In this edition of Deep Cut, I look at why and how the Congress not only missed the opportunity, but also precipitated its decline in the state that it once ruled for decades.

There can be no better example than Odisha to demonstrate the 3D syndrome — denial, delusion and degeneration — that has been ailing India’s grand old party.

The first signs of the Congress losing ground in Odisha came ironically with its winning the state elections in 1995 with a slender majority and a vote share less than 40% in a mostly bipolar contest. Janaki Ballabh Patnaik became the chief minister, but he never enjoyed the confidence of the party’s central leadership, which wanted to promote a tribal leader.