The Congress party, which under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru led India to independence in 1947 and has ruled the country for most of its post-colonial history, runs the risk of near-extinction as a political force in 2016. Congress now has just 44 seats in parliament compared with the 282 of the Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp) of the prime minister, Narendra Modi; that is not even enough to qualify as the main opposition. In 2016 it will probably lose a number of state elections. Among the major states this will leave it in power only in Karnataka, whose capital is Bangalore, where Congress was humiliated in city-council elections in 2015. Neither Congress nor the bjp when it was out of power has ever been in quite such dire straits in terms of having virtually no regional bases to boast of.
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