Bihar Chief Minister Samrat Choudhary turned to history on Monday, October 12, 2026, sharing a pointed critique of the Congress party's decades-long electoral unravelling — amplifying remarks by Union Agriculture Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan that map, state by state, just how far Congress has fallen from its once-dominant perch.

The charge sheet: 90-plus dismissals and the Emergency

The post quotes Chouhan laying two foundational accusations against Congress: that the party '90 se zyada baar chuni hui sarkaren badlane ka paap kiya' ('committed the sin of dismissing more than 90 elected governments'), changing Chief Ministers as casually as one changes clothes. The second charge is the Emergency of 1975 — when democratic processes were suspended under Congress rule, an episode that remains a raw nerve in Indian political memory.

These are long-standing BJP attack lines, but the context in which Chouhan deploys them — as a prelude to a state-by-state electoral audit — gives them a specific, forensic edge.

The map that tells its own story

Chouhan's remarks then shift from accusation to arithmetic, listing states where Congress has been out of power for a generation or more. The figures cited are striking in their span:

• Tamil Nadu — approximately 59 years without a Congress government
• West Bengal — approximately 49 years
• Sikkim — 42 years
• Uttar Pradesh — 37 years
• Bihar — 36 years
• Tripura — 33 years
• Gujarat — 31 years
• Odisha — 26 years
• Nagaland — 23 years
• Goa — 15 years
• Delhi — 13 years

The implicit point is that Congress's absence is not a recent stumble but a structural, decades-long retreat across every major region of the country — north, south, east, and west.

Bihar's 36-year gap: a pointed local reference

That CM Samrat Choudhary — Bihar's Chief Minister and a senior BJP leader — chose to amplify this particular passage is itself notable. Bihar figures prominently in Chouhan's list, with 36 years since Congress last held power in the state. For Choudhary, the statistic is not abstract; it is a description of the political landscape he governs, and a reminder to Bihar voters of what he frames as Congress's irrelevance to the state's story.

Junior partner or near-invisible: Congress in the alliance era

Chouhan's remarks conclude with a wider observation: even in the handful of states where Congress does hold a foothold, it has largely been reduced to a junior coalition partner rather than a governing force in its own right. The critique positions Congress less as a rival to be defeated and more as a party already defeated by its own history — a framing the BJP has used with increasing frequency ahead of state electoral cycles.

For a party that once governed virtually every corner of India, the roll call of absent decades is the sharpest argument its opponents can make — and Samrat Choudhary made sure Bihar heard it.