After having stormed to her first win as chief minister in 1991, Jayalalitha dumped the Congress within a year with the famous words that the party had become “an excess baggage”. True, she had to eat her words ahead of the 1996 elections as she revived the alliance with the national party that triggered a split in the state unit and she and the Congress plunged to their worst defeats ever. Ever since, the Congress’s stature in TN electoral politics has been sliding downwards.
The DMK used its alliance with the Congress to partake in power in Delhi as part of the two UPA governments between 2004 and 2014, but in the assembly elections the Congress has been found wanting. In 2011, the Congress contested 63 seats, but struggled to win just five. In 2016, it got 41 seats but won just eight. As the results sank in, the DMK, which won 89 of the 173 seats it had contested, realised that it could have won more if it had contested in more seats. Instead, the AIADMK could romp home as it made mincemeat of the Congress in direct contests with the national party.
Subsequently, DMK’s district functionaries and its political advisor Prashant Kishor had been urging Stalin to contest at least 200 of the 234 seats in 2021 to improve the DMK’s strike rate. “The Congress definitely does not deserve such a big share and the Bihar results have just proved it,” asserts a DMK district secretary.
The Congress is alive to such a possibility and there have been murmurs among some of its functionaries that the party should explore an alliance with Kamal Hassan’s Makkal Needhi Maiam (MNM) and also rope in other smaller parties like T.T.V. Dhinakaran’s AMMK as part of a viable third front. But senior leaders led by P. Chidambaram have cautioned that any electoral foray outside the DMK-led front would prove suicidal and would further diminish the party’s footprint in the state. Karti Chidambaram, the party’s MP from Sivaganga, is confident that the Congress would continue to be a multiplier with committed vote banks in the southern districts of TN. TNCC president K.S. Alagiri has also gone on record that he expected a decent deal from the DMK.
But the onus is on the Congress to prove it is no excess baggage.
