“The Terminal Decline: How the Indian National Congress Became a Non-Entity in Uttar Pradesh Part 22”, MyIndMakers, 11 Sep 2026.

“The Indian National Congress, the party that governed Uttar Pradesh for the first two and a half decades of independence and claimed the moral authority of the freedom movement as its perpetual political inheritance, is today a political non-entity in the state. In the 2022 UP Assembly elections, the Congress won 2 seats out of 403, a result so catastrophic that it barely constitutes a rounding error in any analysis of UP’s political landscape. In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, despite a modest national recovery under the INDI Alliance framework, the Congress won only a handful of seats in UP, largely on the coattails of the Samajwadi Party’s candidate-sharing arrangement. The party that once swept UP with 83 of 85 Lok Sabha seats in 1984 and that dominated state politics for twenty years has been reduced to a marginal footnote. Understanding how this happened is essential to understanding the political transformation that has made UP the BJP’s most reliable state and to appreciating what the BJP’s rise represents for democratic accountability.

The 1984 Peak and the Beginning of the End

The Congress’s 1984 election in UP was both its greatest triumph and the moment that sealed its long-term decline. The sympathy wave following Indira Gandhi’s assassination produced a mandate so large 83 of 85 Lok Sabha seats in UP that it bore no relationship to the party’s actual organisational strength or governance credibility in the state. The Congress had not repaired the structural failures of its governance in UP; it had not rebuilt the organisational networks that Indira Gandhi’s centralising politics had destroyed; it had not resolved the factional conflicts that had paralysed the state party for a decade. The 1984 mandate was emotional, not organisational, and its scale made the party more complacent than committed to reform………”

Read the full article at MyIndMakers.