Gandhinagar: While the Gujarat Congress finally made up for its total non-representation in the Lok Sabha for a decade in 2024 by getting its lone candidate Geniben Thakor elected, four years later, the party is now set to have zero representation from Gujarat in the Rajya Sabha, when its lone representative Shaktisinh Gohil retires on June 21.This will be the first time that the Rajya Sabha will have no member from the Gujarat's main opposition party.From the late nineties to 2020, the Congress managed to send around three MPs to the Rajya Sabha. However, with the electoral debacle in 2022 and the passing of former Congress heavyweight Ahmed Patel, the party's representation has dwindled to a single seat, which it will find impossible to retain with just 12 MLAs.While the development once again underlines the increasingly monochrome palette of Gujarat polity, a closer look at the numbers reveals the erosion in slow motion.Congress, while in opposition, had retained a steady voter base of more than 35 percent in Gujarat since 2002. While it had managed to win 51 seats in the 2002 state assembly election out of 182, it retained a vote share of 39.45%. In 2007, the seat tally went up to 59 while the vote share came down to 38 %. In 2012, both the number of seats and vote share improved to 61 and 38.93% respectively.By 2017, Congress had come closest to winning in Gujarat, riding the discontent of the Patidar community and won 77 seats with a vote share of 41.40%. However, the party failed to retain the momentum or even capitalise on the growing public sympathy and, in the wake of the Aam Aadmi Party’s (AAP) intrusion, Congress plummeted to just 17 seats in 2022, securing only 27.28% of the vote share as the BJP crossed the 50% threshold for the first time.. Congress bled a massive 14.12% of its vote share, which walked straight over to the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which secured 12.92%.Similarly, in the 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha polls, Congress managed 32.86% and 32.11% of votes, which did not translate into a single seat across 26 Lok Sabha segments of the state. However, in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, the party had managed to win 1 seat and corner 31.24% of the votes in the state.While Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi had earlier claimed that Congress would wrest power from the BJP in Gujarat in 2027, the party suffered a humiliating defeat in the recently held local body election, where it failed to win any of the 15 municipal corporations, drawing a complete blank in Morbi and Porbandar destroying any possibility of a reversal of the party’s electoral fortune in the assembly polls due in about 18 months.Speaking to ET on condition of anonymity, a senior leader from Saurashtra maintained that while the party has managed to retain a core voter base all along, the state leadership has totally failed to galvanise them or organise the support in a cohesive manner. “While the party high command has been dependent on the same set of people who have been briefing them for decades without producing any success, the workers are suffering at the grassroots as the ground under them is being slowly hollowed out,” he added.