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Ideological Challenges and the Decline of the Congress Party

The Congress party that governed India for most of the period since independence suffered its worst electoral loss in 2014. This chapter revisits the history of the Congress and questions whether identity assertion and the ostensible organizational atrophying of the Congress suffice to explain its decline. We attribute the electoral weakness of the Congress party to the shrinking ideological space for the party in many parts of India. The Congress in the past few decades has moved away from the ideological center. The clearest evidence for this comes from the states where the Congress is an electoral force and others where it has no significant impact on the outcome of the election. In states where two centrist parties have emerged the Congress has virtually no presence. The only states where the Congress retains significant support is in states where the BJP is its main opponent.