The Silence of Media.
The quiet is louder than the news. A major national party that is Congress Party is collapsing in front of the country, yet the media landscape treats it as a routine political cycle. BSP fell in almost the same manner, following the same pattern and the same internal rot, but today there is no prime-time debate explaining why the Congress decline looks identical. No editorials, no detailed analysis, no uncomfortable questions. The entire ecosystem is quiet, and the quiet is revealing.
Symbiotic Ecosystem.
This silence exists because modern political journalism is tied to access. Reporters need proximity to Congress leaders for leaks, interviews and relevance. A columnist who writes plainly that Congress is hollowing itself through ticket-selling knows the doors of that ecosystem will close. Intellectual circles depend on invitations, fellowships and funding from the same networks. They do not risk biting the hand that sustains their relevance. Newspapers hesitate for a simpler reason. Congress still purchases advertising and state governments under its rule still provide government ads. Very few outlets want to jeopardize this revenue.
The result is consistent prediction failure. Before every election, analysts assure the public that Congress is competitive. Every time, the outcome contradicts their confidence. Haryana was described as a certain victory. Maharashtra was supposed to be an even contest. Bihar was framed as a tight battle. Each of these certainties collapsed on counting day. The problem was not the data. It was the refusal to acknowledge what voters saw.
Voters have a clear view. They see the party offering tickets to the highest bidder. They know the promises made in Karnataka and Himachal were not fulfilled. They have firsthand experience of who delivered money into their accounts and who delivered only slogans. They recognise which leaders are strong and which are placeholders. None of this appears in much of the mainstream analysis, which continues to rely on theories of caste arithmetic or generic talk of anti-incumbency. When voters are making decisions based on direct experience, analysis based on abstractions is bound to fail.
Shrinking Space
The decline of Congress has moved into a deeper stage. Earlier they lost Government in state after state. Now they are losing the opposition space itself. In Bihar they performed so poorly that even smaller parties with a fraction of their resources nearly matched them. This is not a normal defeat. It is a collapse of relevance. Similar patterns can be seen nationally. The numbers in the Lok Sabha are low, the state assemblies offer no comfort and the organisational structure is eroding. Ticket-selling is now the defining feature of candidate selection, not ideology or performance.
The media cannot speak openly about this for a simple reason. To acknowledge Congress is dying would be to admit that the entire framework of political commentary built around them has also failed. Predictors would have to confess that their models have been illusionary. Analysts would have to admit that their proximity to Congress was not access but dependency. A large part of Delhi’s intellectual class would have to accept that it misread the country for years. It is easier to pretend each defeat is temporary, each setback accidental and each loss a surprise.
Hypocrisy of Media
The irony is that these same intellectuals wrote confidently about BSP’s decline. They analysed every detail of Mayawati’s mistakes. They critiqued the ticket-selling culture of the party, its organisational decay and its loss of connection with voters. But they will not apply the same lens to Congress, even though the symptoms are nearly identical. The difference is social proximity. Mayawati was never a part of their inner world. The Gandhis still are.
This silence creates a peculiar situation in Indian democracy. Politicians mislead voters, and media and intellectuals mislead themselves. The only people acting honestly are voters. They judge quietly, vote consistently and ignore the manufactured narratives. This is why political predictions repeatedly fail. The people making them live inside the system that voters are rejecting.
The real story that should be written is obvious. Congress has adopted the same practices that destroyed BSP and is heading toward the same conclusion. That should be a national discussion, but instead it is hidden under layers of euphemism. Excuses dominate the commentary. Anti-incumbency did not behave as expected. Caste equations shifted. Candidates failed to campaign well. Anything except the actual reason.
Pre-election analysis presents Congress as competitive. Post-election commentary claims the results were surprising. As the next election approaches, the same cycle repeats. It is a prediction racket built on denial. Admitting the truth would undermine the entire structure.
Meanwhile, voters follow a different logic. They are dismantling the old party through a calm, methodical process. First the party was removed from government. Then its position as a major opposition was weakened. Now voters are pushing it toward irrelevance. They are punishing corruption in ticket distribution. They are rewarding delivery over rhetoric. They are moving forward while the analysts remain trapped in old assumptions.
The recent elections in Maharashtra, Haryana and Bihar proved that these losses are not coincidences. They occurred in different regions, with different political landscapes and different alliances. Yet the verdict was the same. This points not to individual failures but to a structural collapse.
Media silence matters because it distorts the understanding of a democratic society. The state is not silencing the press. The press is silencing itself. Relationships with party networks matter more to them than the reality experienced by voters. The gap between media narrative and ground truth grows wider with each election.
Congress will continue declining because it will not reform. Media will continue expressing surprise because its worldview cannot accommodate the scale of this decline. Voters will continue being the only honest participants. The political class built this system, and the electorate is correcting it with remarkable clarity.
The most dishonest part of democracy is not only the politician who sells tickets. It is the ecosystem that refuses to say that it is happening. BSP’s fall was obvious years before it occurred. Congress is following the same trajectory.
The silence surrounding this reality is the loudest evidence of its collapse.
The silence within India’s public sphere is now louder than the news itself. The rapid organisational collapse of a national party like the Congress would, in any healthy democracy, would trigger wide debate, political autopsy, and institutional introspection. Instead, contemporary commentary treats this as an ordinary electoral cycle. This erasure is not accidental; it is symptomatic of a deeper democratic recession. Since 2014, India has entered a structurally altered political era in which the decline of Opposition parties is less a cause than a consequence of systemic transformation……..
The real story, therefore, is not simply that Congress is declining. It is that India’s democratic space is narrowing – politically, institutionally, and discursively. The collapse of the Congress mirrors the earlier decline of BSP, SP, JD(U), TDP, and other regionally significant parties. Each followed the same trajectory: internal decay accelerated by external structural pressure within a political system that no longer treats electoral competition as a pluralistic necessity.
To recognise this is not to defend the Congress; it is to diagnose the condition of the Republic. The loudest evidence of democratic decline is the silence that surrounds it. A democracy does not fail when a party collapses; it fails when its collapse becomes unspeakable.
You should start your own blog. You write well. My apologies for redaction as it looked like an article itself. But do write. Keep it up.