There is a grassroots saying in the bundocks of North India, criminally casteist in its original Hindi, which could be translated into politically correct English as “Don’t write anyone off till their death anniversary has been observed.”

It will, therefore, be too early to write the obituary of either the Indian National Congress or the Bahujan Samaj Party which are the two well-known political parties which have been the worst losers from more than one state in the just concluded elections to five Assemblies.

Equally early is any forecast that the 2024 or 2029 general elections will see Aam Aadmi Party founder president Arvind Kejriwal joust for national leadership with Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister and BJP leader Yogi Adityanath.

The yogi, head of a major Hindu sect mutt, was once known as Ajay Kumar Bhisht, born in what is now Uttarakhand. With some help from Prime Minister Narendra Modi, he retains power in his state, albeit with fewer seats than the record the party had in the elections five years ago.

Five years is a long time in Indian politics, as leaders of all well-known parties in the fray on the 2022 state elections will acknowledge.

Unlike AAP in Punjab, the vote share of BJP has not seen much increase in UP. Along with its allies, BJP’s vote share is around 42 % which is less than 2% more than its share in 2017. However, Akhilesh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party saw around 15 per cent increase in its vote share compared to 2017.

Not surprising, spokespersons of the BJP have been in a great hurry to announce that the 2024 general elections will be fought under the redoubtable leadership of Mr. Modi. The Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh finds a subtle mention in a commitment to nationalism.

Fortunately for Yogi, there are no signs yet that Akhilesh, banking still on the filial support of the Yadav community and possibly of the harried Muslims, will or can foray outside the state of Uttar Pradesh.

Neighbouring Bihar has a strong Yadav leader in Tejaswi Yadav, the son of the iconic OBC leader Lalu Prasad. Haryana’s Jats may have backed Akhilesh in western UP to an extent but prefer their own leaders in their state. That goes also for the Jat Sikhs of Punjab.

Akhilesh has not yet worked on a national image, or a national agenda unless he is accepted by a wider coalition of regional parties. A UP victory would have helped. But the Australia-trained engineer has won succession wars within his clan and is good at making friends and influencing people. But he has not been fully successful in winning competing backward castes. This has been a bridge too far for him, and one which the BJP has exploited to the hilt in wooing the smaller non-Yadav backward groups who had felt neglected in the long rule of the Yadavs after the rout of the Congress in the state.

AAP’s Kejriwal, after 2022, does score over Akhilesh, even though his reputation still remains that of the person specialising in bashing the Congress out of existence wherever he can. In Delhi, he ousted the multiple-term Congress Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, the maker of modern Delhi with its Metro, flyovers and stadia. But he could not displace the BJP from the three municipal corporations which the latter continues to control.

However, of all Chief Ministers, he remains the only one to have scored, and scored well, in other states.

In his second attempt in Punjab, he is forming the new government. And in distant Goa, he did win 2 seats. Mamata Banerjee, whose Trinamool Congress had trounced the BJP in Bengal’s Assembly elections last year, too tested the waters in Goa. It did not win a single seat.

Goa chose to remain with the BJP which won 20 of the 40 seats. It had drummed up a majority last time buying up several legislators from the Congress which had won a majority of the seats. The BJP gave 8 seats to Catholics this time and saw five of them win. The persecution of Christians in Karnataka and other states seemed not to have mattered at all.

What is the secret of Kejriwal’s success in Punjab where his party took off like a missile from the 20 seats it had in 2017 to a whopping 92 in 2022? The ruling Congress could save only 18 seats under its Dalit Chief Minister and a set of warring state leaders.

Everyone else was humiliated. Capt. Amarinder Singh, a two-time Chief Minister and a former prince of Patiala, who had left the Congress to form his own party, Punjab Lok Congress, in coalition with the BJP, lost every one of the 28 seats the BJP gave him.
The BJP itself won only 2 seats, despite its base in the urban non-Sikh business communities.  Both Parkash Singh Badal and Sukhbir Singh Badal of the Shiromani Akali Dal lost and the party won only three of the 97 seats it contested, and its ally Bahujan Samaj Party scored just one seat of the 20 places it set up candidates.

AAP soaked up the votes of the Congress and the Akalis. The angry big farmers who have agitated for a year over the BJP’s farm laws, did not vote for the Dalit face of the Congress. They also would not vote for the Badals who were till well into the agitation sitting in alliance with the BJP in Parliament.

AAP makes no pretence of its ideology even as it confidently sells its promise of improving education and health services, as it has done to an extent in Delhi. 

The ideology Mr Kejriwal mouths is not far from Mr Modi’s oratory. Hindu gods figure large, as do pilgrimages to every known Hindu holy town or river. That is visible in Delhi’s schools as much as the seventy or more massive Tricolour on tall steel masts.

He does have something the Congress has lost – an army of volunteers and a committed cadre very loyal to him, and to him alone.

His confidence is to be seen. In a country where every Chief Minister keeps the most crucial ministries to himself, reluctantly giving some others to faction leaders, Kejriwal despite being Chief Minister in Delhi has left it to his deputy Manish Sisodia to run the government on a day-to-day basis.

An engineer, he once swore by meritocracy. He once led the movement against reservations in education and jobs for scheduled castes. He has now put his faith in professionals to run education, water supply, electricity, and human resource development.

AAP, as he has built it, still has little appeal outside urban areas. Punjab will remain an aberration for the next five years. 

So, what about the Congress. Is there a critical mass left of it anywhere in the country – and that includes Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh where it is ruling on its own, and Maharashtra where it is a junior partner in a multi-group coalition – to set in a process of revival?

Punjab remains its best bet in the next five years if it can find new leaders to replace cricketer Navjot Sidhu as party president, and counter the big moneybags in whom Captain Amarinder Singh may possibly have some hold.

In Uttar Pradesh, the Congress vote share has dropped to 2.4%, its lowest for decades and down from 6.5% in 2017. It could win only two seats against the seven in 2017.

Its real loss has been the total exodus, or betrayal, of its powerful state leaders including RPN Singh, Lalitesh Tripathi, Jitin Prasada and Imran Masood.

Each one of them represented a particular caste, and was, what Modi calls, member of a feudal dynasty. Ironically, most of them joined the BJP.

Seat counts are a handy but imperfect method of gauging the future of a political party, even though it is the only legally accepted method of government formation.

Vote share is more relevant, both in a state and nationally. That works against Mamata Banerjee as she is not a player in most states. The most important is the strengthening of the political machinery, the election apparatus across the states. AAP, better with money, beginning from scratch, worked on that very well.

Mamata and the Chief Ministers of the Andhra states inherited the system when they broke away from the Congress lock stock and barrel. This was also true of Sharad Pawar and several others.

Will the brother and sister duo of Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi be able to revive the grassroots structure that is needed in election time and enthuse party workers with some quality leadership? It is still a moot question.

Perhaps they need to split up the leadership, one focussing on the electoral battle and the other on infrastructure, cadre-building, rethinking economic and social policies.

It will not do good for the Congress to be all things to all people across contradictory lines. It cannot be currying favour with those who believe in religion-based nationalism while also speaking of a secular umbrella for the many diverse religions, castes, social strata, women, Dalits, Adivasis and the landless. Barring the BJP, every other party has a single dynastic leader. Will they be able to survive a transition?

In Punjab, the Akalis have done it once because the founder abdicated the thrown and the son was crowned in his prime. Akhilesh Yadav had a fight, at par with any in mythology, with his uncle. Stalin in Tamil Nadu fought off his brother, before being made the state’s crown prince.

Will these state entities fight off the BJP on their own? And if they do, will they automatically move on to a national-level organic coalition when it comes to choosing the Prime Minister? Historical experience has been sad, as seen first with the Janata Party in 1977-80, and then after the Narasimha Rao rule.

The Congress will have to reinvent itself in each one of the states and union territories, competing in contests with the regional satraps and the BJP, or AAP, if it wants to regain its title of a national party. It will have to be the sum of its local parts.