Singer Bob Dylan’s number Subterranean Homesick Blues has these memorably profound lines: You don’t need a weatherman/ To know which way the wind blows. Well, you can say more or less the same thing about the ongoing General Elections in India — you don’t need a psephologist to know the Congress will be blown out of power. What is uncertain is the magnitude of its impending defeat, the ignominy of it. Will it, as is being speculated, fail to scale past its poorest performance till date — the 114 seats it managed in 1999?

Such speculations suggest that India’s grand old party faces an existential crisis that Sonia Gandhi’s son and heir apparent, Rahul, may not be able to overcome. Yet, for the purpose of balance, it is imperative to view the crisis plaguing the Congress from two perspectives — the immediate and long-term.

The immediate pertains to fathoming the reasons for the inevitable ouster of the Congress-led coalition government —United Progressive Alliance (UPA) — of Manmohan Singh, who’s the only Prime Minister other than Jawaharlal Nehru to have completed two five-year terms in office. Yet, this remarkable feat has been diminished because of the pocket-burning inflation and the popular movement against corruption.

Between June 2009 and 2013-end — the UPA’s second term in office — the inflation rate never went below 8 per cent. It is down to a tolerable 6.98pc this year, but for the Congress, unfortunately, the declining purchasing power had already turned the popular mood hostile. Worse, the inflation rate for food products was even higher, 9pc, and touched a shocking 15.2pc in 2009-2010.

Compounding the UPA’s problems was the global recession, which brought down India’s growth rate from an astonishing 8.4pc per year between 2004 and 2009 to 6.6pc per year in the 2009-2014 period, ironically, still higher than the 5.9pc per year the Bharatiya Janata Party-led coalition government, or the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), had averaged.

It’s human nature to resent even a slight tightening of the purse. But what damaged the government’s credibility irreparably was the surfeit of scams that broke out, linking the inflation-bred woes to the menace of corruption in the popular imagination. You can say the Congress entered the 2014 election race with a torn hamstring muscle.

From this perspective, you can argue that the Congress is a victim of the worldwide recession, over which they had little control. You can say the prime minister couldn’t have penalised corrupt ministers belonging to coalition partners who would have brought down the government in retaliation. It’s possible to claim, therefore, that the defeat facing the Congress is a mere hiccup, and not an existential crisis.

Such a conclusion stands challenged if you were to examine the party’s electoral performance over the last 25 years. Beginning 1989, it has won over 200 seats in the 545-member Lok Sabha, or the directly elected lower House of Indian Parliament, only twice — in 1991 and 2009 — in sharp contrast to winning a majority in every national election post-Independence but for one, in 1977.

In 1991, it won because the coalition government comprising regional outfits proved notoriously unstable. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) couldn’t become a national alternative as it failed to find allies in pockets where it was absent, largely because it was deemed a political untouchable for spearheading the movement to build a temple at the site of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. No less significant was the sympathy vote the Congress mopped following the assassination of its leader Rajiv Gandhi during the 1991 elections. In other words, the Congress won in 1991 not on its strength but because of the weaknesses of its competitors.

This was the dominant theme of the 2004 elections as well: the BJP-led coalition government’s trumpeting of ushering in a Shining India — spiffy malls, swanky cars, smooth highways, the expanding middle class — triggered a reaction among the teeming poor who thought their poverty was being mocked. They gave the Congress 145 seats — and a surprising shot at governance. The Congress, in turn, interpreted the mandate to introduce a slew of social welfare measures, of which the crowning glory was guaranteeing 100 days of wage-job a year to every adult in rural India who was willing to do unskilled manual work. Riding this guarantee, the Congress swept past the 200-mark in the 2009 elections.

The subtext of this narrative is that when out of power, the Congress wins because of the failures of others. In power, it woos the electorate through pro-poor policies, and its innate capacity to mean something to everyone. This dichotomyspeaks of organisational atrophy which has disconnected the Congress from the politics of the street, precisely where new leaders and ideas are spawned. The party comes alive at the faint smell of power, attracting enormous financial resources and toughies to become formidable. It wilts under pressure, dependent on a system in which political dynasties in the region orbit around the Nehru-Gandhi family, both drawing sustenance from each other through their charisma.

This disconnect from street politics explains why the Congress has been out of power for nearly 25 years in the states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, which together account for 120 seats in the Lok Sabha. It hasn’t had a government in Gujarat for 20 years, and failed to mount a credible opposition to its chief minister, Narendra Modi, who is the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate in this election. Its reflex has resembled that of an overweight boxer, appearing paralysed at the myth the BJP spun about the ‘Gujarat Development Model’, the replication of which countrywide is Modi’s poll plank.

Look at the irony — it wasn't the 129-year-old Congress, but barely more than a year-old political fledgling, Aam Aadmi Party, which demonstrated the inimical impact of the Gujarat Development Model, consequently changing the election agenda to an extent. But you can also say the Congress has been hobbled in attacking the Gujarat Model because it wishes not to annoy big business. To mean something to everyone can blunt ideological sharpness, and become a negative in times of class polarisation.

Ultimately, the Congress has been weakened because of the splintering of the social support base it had knitted, comprising upper caste Hindus, the Muslims, and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, now referred to as Dalits, or the downtrodden. In 1990, the government of VP Singh set aside a quota of jobs for the Hindu middle castes, or Other Backward Classes (OBCs), much to the chagrin of upper castes, who felt betrayed by the Congress because of its reluctance to oppose this administrative measure. Worse, the party did not support forthrightly the policy of job quotas either, thus alienating both the OBC and Dalits. The demolition of the Babri Masjid on the watch of Congress Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao had the Muslims desert the Congress ship. Ideological ambiguity, again, works only in the absence of caste and religious polarisation.

In the last 25 years, there has been a proliferation of parties representing the interests of lower castes. For the followers of these parties, their leaders have greater allure than the famed charisma of the Nehru-Gandhi family. The diminishing salience of charisma is inversely proportionate to the rationalisation of India’s politics, evident in the slogan the backward but numerous social groups have coined: our vote, our rule.

Rahul and Priyanka can rebuild the Congress by taking to the streets, not by waving at people from vehicles. India is well past succumbing to the seductive charm of dynasties.

The author is a Delhi-based journalist, and can be reached at ashrafajaz3@gmail.com