Daily Times

NEW DELHI: Prashant Kishor, the election campaign manager brought in by India’s opposition Congress party to reverse its declining fortunes, knew his real work would begin when the party hit rock bottom. It looks like that moment has come. The party run by the fabled Gandhi dynasty, which has led the world’s largest democracy for most of its existence, suffered humiliation last week when it lost Assam to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in a state election.

Congress had controlled Assam, in India’s northeast, since 2001, and for the nationalist BJP it was a first. The race was not even close, underlining the crisis facing the mother-and-son team of Sonia and Rahul Gandhi. Two years ago they were eclipsed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a landslide national ballot won on promises of economic growth and a strong, modern India.

While the euphoria of that time has faded and Modi’s agenda has been slowed by stalled reforms, other state election setbacks and devastating droughts hitting rural India, he remains comfortably the most popular politician. The challenge for Rahul Gandhi, the public face of Congress’ comeback, is to make up lost ground in time for the biggest test before a 2019 general election – the state vote next year in Uttar Pradesh, home to around 200 million people.

That, and the state of Punjab, will go a long way to defining who is the next prime minister; in 2014, the BJP won 71 of 80 parliamentary seats in Uttar Pradesh and only Sonia and Rahul Gandhi held theirs for Congress. Rahul Gandhi declined to be interviewed for this article, but, in a series of public appearances that have become more frequent in recent months, he sought to target Modi directly. “Modi talked about good days to come but today the country is reeling under drought and farmers are committing suicide,” he told a recent “Save Democracy March” of a few thousand people in New Delhi. “Modi has nothing to say.”