Number theory: Is the Congress today where the Jan Sangh was in the ‘60s and ‘70s?
A look at how Cong is trying to achieve what the Jan Sangh did by forming a diverse opposition grouping against a dominant party.
India’s electoral competition is witnessing a triangular alignment with the three poles being the BJP-led NDA, an opposition grouping with the Congress as the biggest party, and unaligned regional parties in the states of Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Punjab. To be sure, an alliance of the Congress and regional parties is not new. But what differentiates the current situation is the fact that the Congress’s own strength has significantly declined. In a way, the Congress is trying to achieve today what a bunch of ideologically different groups, including the socialists, Communists and Dravidian parties tried to do in alliance with the BJP and its predecessor Jan Sangh when the Congress was the dominant party in Indian politics. Here are charts which explain this in detail. 
This is the second of a two-part data journalism series looking at the tripartite realignment taking place in Indian politics. The first part quantified the relative strength of the three groups.
