We do not know if Sonia Gandhi reads Shakespeare. If she does, that evocative line from Hamlet — “when sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions” — must surely be reverberating in her mind today.

This year has not started off well for the Grand Old Party. And each week brings a fresh instalment of bad tidings. The Congress failed to win the municipal elections in Maharashtra and delivered the prized Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation to the Shiv Sena-BJP combine, which was widely regarded as a force on the decline. The party leadership needlessly indulged in a bruising battle with the Left and revived memories of its past autocratic leanings by publicly toying with the constitutionally dodgy and politically suspect idea of imposing President’s rule in UP — before abandoning the option with no clear explanation as to why it had so sloppily embarked on the misadventure in the first place. Then, just as the political class was preparing to get down to some substantive business in the budget session before fanning out to the mother of all battlegrounds in Uttar Pradesh, the Q bomb has returned with all its fury — much to the unconcealed glee of a suddenly resurgent BJP and acute embarrassment for the Congress party and its First Family.

And the battalions of sorrows — the latest to arrive from Punjab and Uttarakhand — show no signs of retreating. Congressmen can take some comfort from the prospects of cobbling together a government in distant Manipur, but that is hardly much consolation for a party that has been driven out of power in almost all of northern India. Barring the small states of Haryana and Himachal and the smaller entity called Delhi (and a dubious independent-led regime in Jharkhand), the Congress has lost its ruling party status across north, west and central India — and with Karnataka gone, it has only Andhra Pradesh to provide a modicum of southern comfort.

... contd.