In the aftermath of the Maharashtra election results, a clamour is rising in the Congress ranks with some of its allies joining in. It is the soundtrack of a sore loser. “We should start a movement for the return of paper ballot,” says party president Mallikarjun Kharge. The EVM dunnit, Congress leaders say. It is not that Congress hasn’t attempted to blame its electoral defeat on the voting machine before — it has, most recently after last month’s Haryana result. But its comprehensive drubbing at the hands of the Maharashtra electorate seems to have left it particularly singed. The party is entitled to its bewilderment. But as the leading party of the Opposition, it also has a duty to be responsible in defeat. It must know that casting aspersions on the established process of free and fair elections, and the rules of the game that anchor it, is a step too far — it cannot be taken lightly. It must be based on verifiable evidence, of which there is none so far; not on “gut feel” or an injured sense of entitlement, or the desperate desire to find a fall guy.
The Congress’s fumbling for answers that has now hit the conspiracy theorist’s dead-end began in 2014, when the Narendra Modi-led BJP first swept to power at the Centre. Its return to the saddle in 2019 and for a third term in 2024, and several assembly elections won by the BJP in between, have only made Congress sink deeper into incoherence. This has even made it undermine its and its allies’ own successes. Congress recently won Karnataka and Himachal Pradesh, and humbled the BJP in the Lok Sabha election in Rajasthan, Maharashtra and UP. Even as it was routed in Maharashtra, its ally JMM has brought it back to power in Jharkhand — it is mean-spirited, at best, and absurd in fact, to say that the BJP “let JMM win” Jharkhand, all the better to hijack the mandate in Maharashtra. This search for easy and imagined villains, this politics of sticking pins into voodoo dolls, is taking a rising toll. It is holding Congress back from an honest reckoning. It needs to ask itself whether it is giving the voters a reason to vote for it — or is it only criticising the BJP? Is it evading the big questions because of its own flawed record, or because of a lack of conviction and clarity? Is its strategy of going hyper-local in response to the BJP’s choreography of large, ideology-drenched narratives a cop-out? When its leader, Rahul Gandhi takes a strong view, does his own weak CV come in the way, or the inability or unwillingness of local Congressmen and women to take their cue from him?
