Abstract: Most writing on the Indian National Congress asks why it declined and what it would take for the party to revive itself. This talk, drawn from a book in progress, asks two different questions. First, why has a party in decline for decades not disappeared? Second, why has it been unable to recover power in many of the states it has lost, from Tamil Nadu in the 1960s to Assam in the 2020s?

I argue that parties live by the stories they tell about themselves, and when political realities change but these stories endure, narratives harden into myths that inhibit adaptation. Three such myths once powered Congress’s dominance and now help explain both its persistence and its decline. The ideological myth casts Congress as the custodian of the idea of India; the governance myth presents it as the natural party of government and the champion of the poor; and the organisational myth imagines a party with a nationwide presence, held together by the Nehru-Gandhi family.

Drawing on historical comparisons with other founding parties, multi-site fieldwork, and analysis of electoral returns and survey data, among other data sources, this book indicates that the Congress story reveals a broader paradox of party decline. It shows that the narratives that sustain a party’s identity and survival can also prevent it from adapting to political change. The Congress may remain a large enough party to occupy the opposition space, yet too myth-bound to fill it.

Bio: Rahul Verma is an associate professor of political science at the Law School, Shiv Nadar University, Chennai. He is a Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research (CPR), New Delhi. Previously, he taught at the Department of Political Science, Ashoka University, Sonipat.

He has a PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include political representation, political parties, public opinion polling and voting behaviour. He is a regular columnist for various news platforms, and has published papers in several peer-reviewed academic journals. 

His book co-authored with Pradeep Chhibber, Ideology and Identity: The Changing Party Systems of India (OUP: New York, 2018), develops a new approach to defining the contours of what constitutes an ideology in multi-ethnic countries such as India. He recently co-edited a volume with Sudha Pai & Shyam Babu – Dalits in the New Millennium (CUP: New Delhi, 2023).