The Congress held “Save Constitution, Save India” rallies across the country on Saturday, the party’s 135th foundation day, protesting the new citizenship law and seeking in it the seeds of its own revival.

The eruption by students and civil society against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act and the proposed National Register of Citizens seems to have come as a blessing for the Congress, which has been grappling with an existential crisis following debacles in successive general elections.

A national discourse dominated by the “death of the Opposition” has suddenly been transformed by the countrywide protests, which have roused the Opposition from the deathbed.

While the defeat of 2014 had been expected, the shock of the 2019 drubbing had almost shattered the Congress’s heart and emboldened the Sangh-BJP to implement its core agenda.

Without the Narendra Modi government perpetrating what the Congress sees as an outrage on India’s secular constitutional scheme, the party with its enervated and leaderless organisational machinery would have been dawdling listlessly on its foundation day.

However, the citizenship protests and the electoral fillips in Haryana, Maharashtra and Jharkhand have created a flicker of hope before the new year and injected some purpose into the Congress’s foundation day celebrations.

While Sonia Gandhi hoisted the party flag at the Congress headquarters, party leaders and workers were out on the streets in the states. Rahul Gandhi was in Guwahati and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra in Lucknow. Other party seniors led marches in major cities, from Jaipur and Thiruvananthapuram to Mumbai and Patna.

Against this backdrop, most Congress leaders believe that Rahul should return as party president next year and complete an organisational restructuring before the end-year Bihar elections.

The Congress remains a fringe player in the key states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, without any pretensions to any impending revival.

While efforts have been made over the past few years to regain the support base in Uttar Pradesh, where Priyanka has now been handed the uphill challenge, Bihar has been a forgotten chapter.

Even at the national level, the party has failed to retrieve the ground lost in the past five years.

While the Congress’s vote share in the 2014 parliamentary elections was 19.52 per cent, which earned it 44 seats, the party polled only 19.70 per cent votes in 2019, winning just 52 seats despite a vibrant campaign by Rahul.

The BJP, which wrested power in 2014 with 31.34 per cent votes, watched its support rise to 37.76 per cent in 2019 despite perceived anti-incumbency sentiments and Modi’s widely acknowledged failure to deliver “achchhe din”.

Stung, Rahul quit as party president, leaving virtually the entire Opposition rudderless.

However, home minister Amit Shah’s ruthless execution of the Sangh parivar’s ideological agenda, from Kashmir to citizenship, has threatened such a humanitarian crisis that the Opposition has felt compelled to wake up.

The Congress, which was founded in 1885, on Saturday posted a tweet highlighting “135 years of unity, justice, equality, ahimsa and freedom”.

While celebrating the party’s track record, the tweet also underlines how these values of the freedom struggle and the Constitution are now in danger.

The Congress has watched its support base shrink from the heights of the freedom struggle and the years after Independence, allowing the Sangh-BJP to control the nationalist narrative with its majoritarian agenda.

Rahul had highlighted the economic distress caused by the demonetisation and the harmful effects of divisive politics during the 2019 campaign but Modi hijacked the discourse with his anti-Pakistan, militarist rhetoric.

The political and economic situations have worsened since then. The BJP’s most trusted ally, the Shiv Sena, has dumped it while the other partners are ill at ease; economic growth has crashed and unemployment is at a 45-year high.

What is most significant is that large sections of the youth and civil society that are in no way enamoured with the Congress have risen against the BJP on the issue of constitutional sanctity. All this spells hope for the Opposition.

The BJP’s political expansion has halted over the past couple of years. The party has only three big states under its direct control: Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Karnataka.

The Opposition will get a chance to oust the BJP from these states before the next general election, but that will be possible only if the Congress succeeds in strengthening its organisation and helping consolidate Opposition unity.