Congress no player in Odisha with dropping vote shares; leaders flag ‘high command neglect’, factionalism

AS VOTING wraps up in nine of the total 21 Lok Sabha seats in Odisha, there seems to be no resurrection of Congress fortunes. The party that won just one seat in 2019, Koraput, seems in with a chance in only two – Koraput again and Nabarangpur in Koraput district, a region known to be its fortress.

The Congress has been declining in the state, and the 14% of the votes it got in the Lok Sabha polls for a single seat, was a fall of as much as 12.4% from 2014, when it won no seats. In 2009, before the start of the Modi wave, the Congress got 32.7% of the votes, and won six seats.

In the same 10-year period, the BJP has gone from strength to strength. In 2009, the party finished above third in just one seat, where it got 35% vote share, and secured more than 20% vote share in a total of six seats. In 2014, the BJP got more than 30% vote share in four seats and more than 20% in another eight. In 2019, the party’s vote share was in the 30%-40% range in almost every Lok Sabha seat barring Koraput and Jagatsinghpur, where it polled 19.28% and 28.3%, respectively.

The Congress had contested 18 of Odisha’s 21 Lok Sabha seats in 2019, leaving one each to allies CPI, CPI(M) and Jharkhand Mukti Morcha. Of the 18, the Congress got less than 10% of the votes in six, and below 20% in seven seats.

Given its traditional base in the tribal-dominated Koraput-Balangir-Kalahandi (KBK) region, the Congress managed to secure over 20% vote share in some constituencies in this region. Beyond the KBK region, the party secured sizeable vote share in Sundargarh, another tribal-dominated area, where it was 24.36%.

In this landscape, the Congress state unit admits a drooping morale. In the run-up to the polls, at least a dozen senior leaders, including