The Congress may have played its best bet for Andhra Pradesh ahead of the Lok Sabha elections scheduled next year – though going by the number of big-ticket decisions taken by the UPA government of late it could come earlier – but is the ace called Telangana going to work?

If morning shows the day, Wednesday (July 31) did not exactly come out all cheers the party. A day after the ruling alliance, and then the party’s all-powerful working committee (CWC) decided to give the go-ahead to bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh, there are the expected signs of rumble within the party. According to reports, some Congress MPs and MLAs, most of them from the Seemandhra region of AP who consider themselves victims at the altar of a political game, have already resigned and several more are waiting in queue.

The party would of course retort that those resignations were expected anyway. It would also point out that chief minister Kiran Kumar Reddy, instead of offering to quit, as was expected on July 30 when he flew to New Delhi from Hyderabad for the crucial meeting with the high command (read our story here), has instead already asked legislators as well as people of Rayalaseema and coastal AP (the two regions outside of Telangana that are together called Seemandhra) to get on with their lives. According to reports on NDTV, he reportedly told his cabinet colleagues on Wednesday: “It (statehood for Telangana) is a painful decision for me also. But we now need to look at [the] road ahead and how to move ahead on the new states.”

So what’s the electoral math? There are 17 seats in the newly approved Telangana, and there are zero chances that the party would win them all. The man for all seasons to fight Congress’s battles, Digvijay Singh, had on Tuesday said soon after the CWC meeting approved of the bifurcation that the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS), which has been in the vanguard for a separate state, would merge with the Congress, as “promised”. But a day on, TRS chief K Chandrasekhar Rao is silent. Chances are, now that the state is being formed, the TRS would not like to give up after fighting for it so long – and by and large alone for a long time – after splitting from the Congress. Abdicating the fruits of labour is not exactly writ large on Indian political parties’ DNA.

Chances are, the TRS would form an alliance, and post-poll at that, with the Congress if it comes anywhere near forming the next government at the Centre, thereby becoming a threat factor. Chances are also high that the party high command could as good as give up any hope of winning any of the remaining 25 seats.

While it could be clutching at straws – there were all indications that the party stood to be decimated in the 42 seats of AP otherwise – the Telangana ace could come back to haunt the Congress in other states with similar separatist demands. Take Maharashtra’s Vidarbha belt, for instance. The BJP-Shiv Sena alliance has as good as hijacked Vidarbha off the Congress kitty for nearly two decades. It is also one region where the Congress could have hoped to gain following the scandals coming out of former BJP president Nitin Gadkari’s cupboard in the wake of the allegations of corruption. But creation of Telangana would lend a shot in the arm to Vidarbha’s own demand for a split from Maharashtra, and a lack of response can only brew further discontent against the ruling party, which has only one Lok Sabha member from the region.

Like Vidarbha, the Telangana card could also come as a setback in Uttar Pradesh, where the Congress put up an extremely credible performance in the 2009 general elections. With Mayawati already jumping to the cause of smaller states, and all pre-poll surveys showing no dip in fortunes for the ruling Samajwadi Party, Telangana tears could moisten the results here as well.

Similar could be the case in Gorkhaland in north Bengal and Bodoland in Assam, among others. Chances also are that the Telangana go-ahead would trigger demands for more states. And that is where the peeling off of Telangana could bring the onion tears for the Congress party in the long run.