The Congress may have rekindled a new wave of hope in Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal in these by-elections, but the talk of the town is about the party’s resounding defeat in the Northeast. The party expected that after Rahul Gandhi’s ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’, the party would perform brilliantly in the three recent assembly elections in the Northeast, but its opposite happened. Anyway, the big leaders of the party including the Gandhi family did not take the elections in the Northeast seriously and did not even bother to campaign there. As a result, in Meghalaya, where the Congress won 18 out of 60 seats in the 2018 elections, this time it came down to 5. Even after alliance with the Left in Tripura, it could win only 2 seats while in Nagaland the Congress party got swept away. Now the party leaders are saying that from now on the Congress is going to put its full strength in Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh, where it is confident of forming the government. The party has left Rajasthan to Gehlot and is sure of making a comeback in Chhattisgarh.