In less than six months of improving its ‘resounding’ tally in the Lok Sabha as an elder brother of its alliance partners, Congress is back to its ‘introspection’ war room to analyse the electoral losses starting with Haryana followed by Jammu and Kashmir and now in Maharashtra and certain bypolls to give ammunitions to its younger brothers of the INDIA Bloc to rethink of a Third Front to lead the show.

“The results of Maharashtra are unexpected and we will analyse those in detail,” said party’s chief strategist Rahul Gandhi, who shall be again in the scanner after giving a face saving performance in this year’s Lok Sabha where he managed to get a Leader of Opposition status which was deprived in the last two Lok Sabhas.

The poll results have further diminished the grand old party’s role in the Opposition bloc as compared to its regional alliance partners. The party’s strength in Lok Sabha also got reduced to 98 seats after it lost the Nanded Lok Sabha to the BJP in the bypolls. Congress however attempted to put up a brave front, and celebrate the expected massive Lok Sabha by-election win for Priyanka Gandhi in Wayanad.

“Enough of coalition politics, I think the voters are looking only to the Congress and they are confused with too many cooks in the broth. Near future I also understand the way our electorates are behaving, very soon we will see only Congress and the BJP playing on the electoral turf,” said a senior Congress MP on the latest poll results when asked what went wrong again after Haryana.

In Jammu and Kashmir where the polls were held recently and now in Haryana and Maharashtra the grand old party continued losing space as it posted a worst-ever show in Maharashtra and ending up a distant junior partner to the in Jharkhand.

Losing a big state like Maharashtra after the upset in Haryana is likely to weaken the grand old party’s broad bargaining power in this era of coalition politics.

The outcome revealed that the Congress continued to falter on the slippery electoral landscape, struggling to win or improve in states where it is ruling and failing to uplift alliances where it is the senior partner.

In Haryana, where the Congress and BJP were in direct contest, the party could not convert the anti-incumbency of BJP’s two terms into a win. Now in Maharashtra, it was unable to retain its Lok Sabha gains or help its allies pull through.

Questions are also expected to be raised on the modus operandi of Congress party’s chief strategist Rahul Gandhi who has of late focused heavily on caste census as both issues appear to have failed to resonate among the people at large in the poll-bound states.

In the run up to the General Elections several leaders in the likes of Nitish Kumar, K Chandrashekar Rao, Mamata Banerjee, Akshilesh Yadav , M K Stalin were hobnobbing to lead a Third Front but Congress finally convinced to lead the family of non-BJP members. Interestingly Mamata and Nitish, both Chief ministers and boss of their party had to call it a day from the Congress hegemony and chose different path. While Nitish’s JDU is now part of BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA), Mamata joined the chorus after Congress “good” performance in the 2024 Lok Sabha.