)
After a spate of scams, corruption charges that scalped several Union ministers and washed out Parliament sessions – the general perception is that Congress as a political party has been losing ground.
Surprisingly, statistics reveal otherwise. In the 21 states that went to assembly polls post May 2009 general elections; a bird's eye-view of the performance of the two national parties the Congress and the BJP shows that the Congress gained 191 seats and lost 86 seats while the BJP in the same period gained only 51 seats and lost more than double that number 144 seats.
It was Union minister Kapil Sibal in the CNN-IBN programme "Devil’s Advocate" recently, who rejected the popular perception that the Congress did not enjoy popular mandate and cited the performance of the Congress vis a vis the BJP in the past two years where 11 states had gone to polls and asserted that the Congress has been gaining ground while the BJP which has been gradually losing seats over the past four years.
It is striking that in several states – Puducherry, Kerala , Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Manipur, Meghalaya and Tripura – the BJP has not managed to bag a single seat over the past two assembly polls ie in a decade.
