New Delhi: The longest absence is the most definitive marker. In Tamil Nadu, the Indian National Congress last held the chief minister’s office in 1967, when M. Bhakthavatsalam demitted power. Nearly six decades on, the party remains structurally excluded from a Dravidian system it once dominated. That long arc now faces a live electoral test, with five states, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Kerala, Assam and Puducherry, in the middle of an election cycle that mirrors the geography of its decline.
decade later. West Bengal has not seen a Congress chief minister since 1977, when Siddhartha Shankar Ray exited office, giving way to a prolonged Left Front rule and later to the All India Trinamool Congress. In Tripura, the last Congress chief minister, Samir Ranjan Barman, left in 1993, marking the beginning of uninterrupted non-Congress rule.
The Hindi belt tells a similar story of early collapse. Uttar Pradesh has not had a Congress chief minister since Narayan Dutt Tiwari in 1989, while Bihar last saw one in Jagannath Mishra in 1990. These were not peripheral losses. They removed Congress from the core of India’s political geography.
Western and eastern India followed in the 1990s. In Gujarat, Chhabildas Mehta was the last Congress chief minister, exiting in 1995. In Odisha, Congress retained the office until 2000, when Hemananda Biswal demitted power, ending its final phase of control in the state.
The North-East reflects a later withdrawal rather than an absence. Nagaland last had a Congress chief minister in 2003 under S. C. Jamir, underscoring the party’s decline. There remain pockets where the party has never led a government on its own. Sikkim and Jharkhand fall into this category, though the party has participated in coalitions in the latter.
Measured against the present, the contrast is stark. Since 2020, Congress has had its own chief minister in only a handful of states, currently limited to Karnataka, Telangana and Himachal Pradesh, with recent but now-lost governments in Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Punjab and Madhya Pradesh.
A closer look at the past two decades shows that even the apparent recoveries were limited and shortlived. In 2000, Congress had chief ministers in six states. This rose to nine in 2005 during a partial recovery phase, before slipping to seven by 2010. By January 2015, the number again stood at nine, but with a composition increasingly concentrated in smaller states and the North-East rather than the larger political centres it once dominated. Across these intervals, the pattern is not one of sustained expansion, but of brief stabilisations within an overall downward trajectory.
What emerges is a phased contraction. The first losses appear in the south and east by the 1970s, the Hindi belt slips by the late 1980s, and the remaining strongholds erode through the 1990s and early 2000s. The present map is not the result of a single electoral cycle, but of a long, sequential retreat, even during its decade in power at the centre under the United Progressive Alliance, that has left the party with isolated centres of power rather than a continuous national footprint.
This long retreat now intersects with a live electoral cycle as Assam, Kerala, Puducherry, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal move toward counting on 4 May. The elections provide a contemporaneous snapshot of the party’s position within the same geography where its decline unfolded. In Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, the earliest sites of its exclusion in 1967 and 1977, the Congress remains structurally peripheral, operating as a junior partner in one and a marginal electoral force in the other. In Assam, it faces an entrenched incumbent with limited organisational recovery. Puducherry remains competitive but narrow in scale.
Kerala is the only partial deviation. As the anchor of the United Democratic Front, Congress retains a credible pathway to forming a government. That possibility does not alter the underlying trajectory, but it introduces a limited counterpoint within an otherwise consistent pattern.
