A roller-coaster of a week ended, in balance, with the Congress party's fortunes, and that of its president Rahul Gandhi, on the upswing. It defeated the ruling BJP 3-0 in the assembly elections in the Hindi states; it sorted out its leadership dilemma in Rajasthan in a way that will bring them five to seven more seats in the 2019 parliamentary elections; it got a reprieve in the controversy surrounding the Rafale jet fighter deal when the government represented inaccurately to the Supreme Court; the appointment of a favoured bureaucrat as the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor came under all-round condemnation; and the two most powerful men, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP chief Amit Shah, look visibly unnerved by their electoral and other setbacks. Rahul ends 2018 on a happy note.

The wins in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh were hard-fought and well-earned, with painstaking vigilance during the counting, especially in MP, where the Congress had to work overtime in each and every booth to prevent hanky-panky. Ground reports say that officials were ordered to help the BJP in a contest where over 30 paper-thin margins kept see-sawing between the two. Yes, there is sunny glorification of outgoing chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan for "bowing out gracefully" and being of "the Vajpayee mould", which is all balderdash considering the Vyapam job recruitment scandal in the state, in which around 2,000 have been arrested and over 40 - whistle-blowers or witnesses, etc - have died unnaturally. True, the Congress did not cover itself with glory by selecting veteran Kamal Nath as the new CM, as he is perceived to have led a mob during the November 1984 anti-Sikh riots. Yet, it would have been an epic disaster had a local "rajah" like Jyotiraditya Scindia been appointed.