And then there is more. The Congress also performed miserably in key bypolls held in nearly 60 assembly seats; the majority being the 28 in MP where the Congress was hopeful of returning to power.

The electoral reverses—or is maintaining status quo an apt description?—come at a time when the party had initiated the process of settling its leadership question through a long-overdue AICC session. On October 29, in the midst of hectic election campaigning, Congress office-bearers across the country were asked by party leader Madhusudan Mistry to furnish necessary information for convening an AICC session “as soon as possible”.

Mistry’s job as chairman of the party’s central election authority, any Congress insider would confirm, is to ensure yet another smooth transition—from incumbent Sonia Gandhi back to her son and predecessor, Rahul Gandhi. With voters rejecting the Congress once again—the party won just 19 of the 70 seats it contested in Bihar, nine out of 28 in MP and none in Gujarat, UP and other states—Mistry has an unenviable task at hand.

The voices of discord within the Congress against the diminishing brand value of the Nehru-Gandhi clan at the hustings and Rahul’s failure in projecting his idiom of politics as a better alternative to that of the BJP’s have begun afresh. The Congress’s allies too are getting restless; fed-up of lugging the party’s carcass every election season while Rahul lazily contemplates on his political future and leaves all the heavy-lifting to a Tejashwi in Bihar, Hemant Soren in Jharkhand, Sharad Pawar in Maharashtra or M.K. Stalin in Tamil Nadu.

For the 23 Congress leaders who had, in July, written to Sonia demanding swe-eping reforms within the party—key among them “an effective, visible and full-time leadership”—the results in Bihar or other state bypolls come as a vindication of their stand. There is, however, little that these leaders—among them party veterans like Ghulam Nabi Azad, Mukul Wasnik, Kapil Sibal, Veerappa Moily, Bhupinder Hooda, Prithviraj Chavan and Manish Tewari—can cheer about. Lambasted by their peers at the Congress Working Committee meeting that was convened in August by Sonia to discuss their dem-ands and sidelined within the party for their “betrayal”, the 23 leaders see little hope for a course correction by the party. They haven’t yet decided on what they plan to do next but assert privately that their ranks have been swelling.

The “smear campaign” unleashed against them by fellow-Congressmen following the letter episode has forced several signatories into silence. Some decided to bury the hatchet after Sonia revamped the AICC and accommodated few of the letter-writers in various intra-party panels and assured others of corrective steps in the making. Sibal app-ears to be the only exception. “We know what is wrong with the Congress…The Congress itself knows all the ans-wers but they are not willing to recognise those answers. If they do not recognise those answers, then the graph will continue to decline. That is the sorry state of affairs that the Congress is in,” he says.

Another signatory to the letter says, req-uesting anonymity, that following the Bihar rout, the party is “back to singing the same old tune for introspection…we are yet to introspect over our 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha defeats; now we have to introspect about Bihar besides the dozen other states in which we have lost elections since 2014…they keep saying the CWC will introspect but what credibility does the CWC have if it only wishes to act as a rubber stamp of the Gandhis and fails to even acknowledge the real challenges of leadership, direction and ideological clarity that we sought?”

Another senior leader says the Congress could benefit immensely if it objectively analysed its Bihar campaign as “just one sample of our electoral ine-ptness”. He says the party damaged the Mahagathbandhan by delaying the seat-sharing talks and then “contesting 70 seats despite knowing that we lacked the wherewithal to run an effective campaign on more than 50 seats”. Rahul, the leader said, “went off to Shimla (the Wayanad MP spent three days at Priya-nka Vadra’s residence) for a break and addressed just half a dozen public meetings in Bihar…Tejashwi hailed Rahul as the most promising leader standing against Narendra Modi during their joint rallies but Rahul rarely praised Tejashwi. Priyanka refused to campaign in Bihar despite several candidates and the state unit requesting her to do so”.

The Congress’s poor show in Bihar has allowed its allies to criticise the party. Dipankar Bhattacharya of the CPI (ML) and Shivanand Tivary of the RJD have separately blamed the Congress for weakening the grand alliance through poor poll management and rued Tejashwi’s magnanimity that gave the Congress 70 seats. The Congress’s inability to even win traditional Muslim-dominated strongholds in the state’s Seemanchal area where Asaduddin Owaisi’s AIMIM made significant inr-oads has also led to murmurs within the party over its diminishing appeal among the minority community.

Party veteran and CWC member Tariq Anwar tells Outlook that “Owaisi’s growing appeal among Muslims beyond Hyderabad should worry the Congress and the party must seriously think why the community is abandoning it despite our stated commitment to secularism”.

Repercussions of the poor show in Bihar are also likely to be felt by the Congress when it begins seat-sharing talks with DMK’s Stalin in Tamil Nadu and the Left parties in Bengal, while keeping the party’s flock together will be a major challenge in Assam, say party leaders. These states are headed for ass-embly polls next year. Assam aside, the Congress is a fringe player in the other two and depends on the power of its alliance to score victories.

Congress sources say a victory in Bihar would have helped the party settle the leadership issue in Rahul’s favour with some ease despite the letter controversy still fresh in public memory. “We were confident of a good show in Bihar and were hopeful of some success in the Gujarat, UP and MP bypolls too. These would have made it easier for Rahul to take back the reins. The AICC session is being planned for January but with these defeats you can expect more leaders speaking out against Rahul. A new round of defections may also start bec-ause career politicians in the party see no sign of a Congress revival,” says a Congress MP and Rahul confidant.

?The Congress will mark its 136th foundation day on December 28. The Nehru-Gandhis may have no real cause to celebrate though, especially if the days leading up to the milestone witness a res-urgence of rebellion before the party can talk about revival. For Sonia, Rahul and Priyanka—ridiculed by critics as joint proprietors of the Congress—the Bihar debacle may well have announced the arrival of yet ano-ther winter of discontent.