Will Congress Cross 40? Kerala Holds The Key

The Congress party’s central leadership celebrated Women’s Day with characteristic reverence and sensitivity, by formalising 19 male candidates for the 20 parliamentary seats in Kerala.

The sole exception was Ramya Haridas, a spunky, young firebrand orator with a golden voice who won the Scheduled Caste (SC)-reserved Alathur seat in South Malabar with a decent margin in 2019.

The significance of Haridas’ victory becomes more starkly apparent when we note that Alathur is one of only six SC reserved seats of the 84 in India that the Congress managed to win in 2019. By comparison, they won 30 such seats in 2009.

What made it worse was that this announcement was entirely without irony, and compounded by party president Mallikarjun Kharge’s mispronunciation of the Indian President's surname at a public rally.

Congress spokesperson Shama Mohammed unwittingly added to the general laughter pool by expressing her resentment on social media a few hours after the candidate list for Kerala was released: "What a black #WomansDay," she wrote, ostensibly miffed at having been denied a ticket.

And that, in a nutshell, summed up the Congress' congenital inability to get its act together. The ramifications are grave for the party because if it can’t sweep Kerala in the coming general election, then its chances of winning more than 40 seats in the parliament grow as dim as a dusty dusk.

Of the 52 seats the Congress won in 2019, a full 15 were from Kerala. In fact, 31 of these 52 wins, or almost two-thirds, are from three states alone: 15 in Kerala, eight in Punjab, and eight in Tamil Nadu.

Pertinently, 33 of these 52 wins were rare and precious gains, of which, again, eight are from Kerala, five from Punjab, and eight from Tamil Nadu (total 21 of 33 gains from these three states alone).

If the Akali Dal and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) form an alliance in Punjab, and there exists a high chance that they finally might, then the Congress could potentially score a duck in the land of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, since their alliance with the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has failed.

The severe inference is that paltry Congress gains in Telangana would not make up for these staggering losses. Fifty-two minus 16 (from the nine states mentioned above) plus five (from Telangana) is still only 41, and that is without assessing the deep south.

Under these circumstances, Kerala and, to a lesser extent, Tamil Nadu are central to the Congress party's national fortunes. Parashurama’s land, and the voting patterns of the axe-born, take far greater precedence for the Congress than any other part of the union. How will they fare?

It's not possible to compare the present ground situation with the results of 2019, since the Kerala Congress of Jose K Mani, the KEC(M), left the Congress-led alliance for the Communists in 2020, along with a major portion of the vital Christian vote. Thus, the 2021 assembly elections are the new benchmark.

In 2019, the Congress alliance won 19 of 20 seats in Kerala: Congress took 15, KEC(M) one, Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) two, and the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) one. The Congress lost Alappuzha seat to the Communists by just 10,474 votes.

But if we total up the assembly segment results of 2021 to the parliamentary level, we see that the situation is comprehensively reversed: the Communists win 14, the Congress wins only four seats, the IUML barely manages to hold on to its two traditional preserves (Ponnani, shockingly, by a proverbial whisker of just 9,772 votes), and the RSP loses by over 1 lakh votes in Kollam.

In effect, the Congress loses 11 seats from 2019, and 41 minus 11 is 30! That is not good news for them. A comparative map of wins in 2019 and 2021 says it all:

The changes are remarkable:

First, note how Rahul Gandhi’s whopping 4-lakh-plus victory margin in Wayanad in 2019 gets slashed down to 38,776 in 2021: that is a drop of 90 per cent!

It's not just his tattered I.N.D.I alliance that has been flung under the bus by the Communists, his ostensible allies in the rest of the country, but his electoral fortunes too.

Second, the IUML’s near-2-lakh margin in Ponnani drops to 9,772, which means that it could lose one of its two strongholds to the Communists. The last time that happened was in 2004 when Moplahs, disgruntled with the Congress waffling over the second Gulf War, voted for the Communists in the Manjeri seat (now Malappuram, after the delimitation of 2009).

Third, the Congress could regain Alappuzha; but, with these slender margins, anything is possible. So too with Mavelikkara, another reserved SC seat, which is probably why multi-term Congress Member of Parliament (MP) Kodikkunil Suresh had to be forced to accept the ticket this time.

Fourth, Hibi Eden, the sitting Congress MP for the prestigious Ernakulam seat, is going to be pushed to the wall, and perhaps over it. He may find some relief in the fact that his position is not as precarious as that of Shashi Tharoor in Thiruvananthapuram (which will see a tightly contested three-way battle with narrower margins).

Sixth, Shafi Parambil, sitting Congress legislator for Palakkad assembly constituency, has been dispatched against his wishes to Vadakara, to contest against K K Shailaja Teacher (Kerala’s health minister during the pandemic).

It will take a miracle for Parabil to win, but the double-edged sword is that if he does win, then it is fairly sure that the Congress will lose that assembly seat in the ensuing byelection.

And then, there is the BJP. In 2021, the BJP lost 3 per cent of the popular vote to the Communists, bringing their vote share down to 13 per cent. In 2024, the BJP is expected to recover this 3 per cent from the Communists and get about as much more from the Congress.

The party could cross the 20 per cent mark this time, Suresh Gopi could win in Thrissur (at the cost of the Congress), and maybe do slightly better even, if they run a sizzling campaign.

As a result, it becomes increasingly more difficult for the Congress to make up for the departure of the KEC(M) and that crucial Christian vote. If this scenario comes true in 2024, and there is every possibility that it could, then the Congress is not just looking at a drubbing in Kerala, but, by extension, a tally of under 40 seats in the Lok Sabha.