The results of the 2026 Assembly elections will redraw the contours of political competition across India. These are not routine State polls. They will serve as a barometer of the BJP’s dominance, test the Congress’s ability to compete independently, and redefine the relationship between the Congress and regional parties—an equation with a direct bearing on the 2027 Uttar Pradesh Assembly election and the 2029 general election.

In Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, and Puducherry, the Congress confronts a recurring dilemma: whether to shelter under regional umbrellas or fight alone. In Assam and Kerala, it is the principal challenger. In West Bengal, it has struck out on its own after two failed alliances. In Tamil Nadu, it remains a junior partner of the DMK.

Assam

In Assam, where the Congress and the BJP are locked in a direct contest, several Congress leaders defected to the BJP ahead of the polls, eroding the advantage the party initially held from two-term anti-incumbency against the ruling dispensation. The Congress will, in all probability, improve its tally, but the extent of that recovery remains unclear.

Assam also illustrates the steady decline of regional parties, visible in the results of the last few elections. This time, the contest is even more starkly bipolar—a trend that began with the BJP’s emphatic victory in 2016, when it benefited enormously from alliances with the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) and the Bodoland People’s Front (BPF), both of which remain within the NDA fold. The Congress has roped in a range of regional allies this time, but it is the national parties that occupy centre stage.

If the BJP secures a hat-trick in Assam, the revival of the Congress across the North East will remain a distant prospect. A dramatic resurgence of regional parties, despite strong local and identity-based sentiments, appears unlikely; both the Congress and the BJP have appropriated the language of regional pride and identity.

West Bengal and Kerala

In West Bengal, the Congress has fielded Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, a trenchant critic of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, from the Baharampur Assembly constituency—his first Assembly contest in 30 years. Chowdhury remains the most experienced and recognisable face of the party in the State, having served as Leader of the Congress in the Lok Sabha. He lost his Baharampur Lok Sabha seat in the 2024 general election.

When Chowdhury said during the campaign that he was starting from scratch, he inadvertently mirrored the condition of the Congress in the State. Once the ruling party until 1977, it was first displaced by the Left Front and later by the Trinamool Congress in 2011. The party has repeatedly hitched its wagon to the Left or the TMC.

This time, the party has chosen to go it alone. Alliances with the Left in 2016 and 2021 failed to arrest its decline. The Congress-TMC alliance in 2011 had ended the Left Front’s 34-year rule, but the relationship since then has oscillated between cooperation and hostility.

The Congress drew a blank in the 2021 Assembly election, nosediving from 44 seats in 2016 to zero. Having reached its nadir, even a marginal improvement will be projected internally as a revival. Such a result could also see Chowdhury assigned a larger organisational role, given the growing view within the party that it must chart an independent course in States where it has little left to lose. West Bengal fits that description, unlike Tamil Nadu, where the Congress continues to shelter under the DMK’s umbrella.

If the Trinamool Congress secures a fourth consecutive term, calls to project Mamata Banerjee as the leader of the Opposition alliance in 2029—with or without the Congress—will grow louder. A BJP victory in West Bengal, on the other hand, would provide a major morale boost to the ruling party, which surprised observers by winning Odisha in 2024 and subsequently Maharashtra and Haryana, substantially compensating for its Lok Sabha setbacks that year.

In Kerala, if the LDF wins a third consecutive term—as predicted by veteran Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar, though the party has since said he is no longer a member—the Congress will be forced to fundamentally rethink its INDIA alliance experiment. Dissent within the Congress is already growing, with critics arguing that the leadership appears too accommodating towards parties that are the Congress’s principal rivals in their respective States.

Many within the party believe that short-term alliances have derailed efforts to rebuild the Congress, which has lost three consecutive Lok Sabha elections since 2014, as well as State elections in Maharashtra, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, Bihar, and Delhi over the last three years.

The Opposition’s failure to capitalise on the BJP’s reduced majority in the 2024 general election during subsequent Assembly polls has further dented the morale of Congress workers. A Congress victory in Kerala would ease some of this pressure and check the rising influence of dominant regional parties and the non-Congress opposition.

A Congress win in Kerala, combined with a BJP victory in West Bengal, would draw national politics towards a direct BJP-versus-Congress contest in 2029, reducing the centrality of regional parties. The results will also determine who emerges as the principal Opposition challenger to the NDA.

Tamil Nadu

The tension between the Congress and regional parties has surfaced repeatedly during this election season. Rahul Gandhi’s absence from the campaign in Tamil Nadu, where the DMK-Congress alliance is seeking a second term, has fuelled speculation about the state of the relationship between the two parties.

While Prime Minister Narendra Modi has held multiple rallies in the State, Gandhi addressed meetings in Puducherry and Kerala on April 6, skipping Tamil Nadu altogether. BJP and AIADMK leaders portrayed this as evidence of friction within the DMK-Congress alliance.

Congress leaders maintain that Gandhi focused on States where the party is the principal challenger—the UDF’s rival the LDF in Kerala and the BJP in Puducherry. Yet the optics spoke otherwise. On the same day, DMK president M.K. Stalin was also in Puducherry, but the two leaders neither met nor shared a stage. Gandhi did not refer to Stalin in his speech. He went on to meet six rebel Congress candidates who had filed nominations against DMK and VCK nominees in the Union Territory, despite the party having earlier warned of disciplinary action against them.

Whether Gandhi will campaign in Tamil Nadu after April 10 remains to be seen. Earlier, he was expected to address four rallies in the State in late March. The seat-sharing arrangement was contentious: the Congress settled for 28 seats and one Rajya Sabha berth, far fewer than the 45 it initially demanded. In contrast, the party extracted better terms from allies during the Bihar and Maharashtra Assembly polls and the Uttar Pradesh leg of the 2024 Lok Sabha election.

TVK chief Vijay, in a campaign speech on April 8, described both the DMK and BJP alliances as fractured, alleging that internal rivalries could spill over into voting behaviour. While such claims belong to the realm of campaign rhetoric, one thing is clear: a poor Congress performance in direct contests—particularly in Kerala and Assam—will weaken its bargaining power against dominant regional parties ahead of future elections.

The Congress leadership is acutely aware of this risk, which explains the intensity of its campaign in this round of polls. Voting concludes across the poll-bound States in April. Whether this proves to be the cruellest month for the Congress or one that restores a measure of hope will be known only on May 4, when the results are declared.

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