NEW DELHI: Congress forms fact-finding committees in eight states omitting Jharkhand, Bihar and Gujarat.
After a disappointing performance in some states, the Congress party has formed six fact-finding committees to asses the cause of setback in eight such states. However, the party is yet to announce such committees for other poorly performing states like Jharkhand, Bihar and Gujarat.
The party, by far, has made committees for Orissa, Chattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Telangana, Karnataka and Delhi.
According to a Congress leader, “Lok Sabha results in Karnataka, Telangana and Bihar have been very upsetting for the party. We were expecting 20 more seats from the three states combined. In Bihar, we thought the people were responding to us the way people were responding in Uttar Pradesh but the Bihar leadership could not tap the votes. In the other two states where we have our own government, there was some coordination issues between the leaders that made us lose seats.”
On the other hand, the grand old party was prepared to expect least from Gujarat (where it got one seat), Uttarakhand, Orissa and Madhya Pradesh. MP was expected to bring Congress atleast two seats, however it even lost its bastion constituency of Chindwara. The party had won the seat in 2019 out of the 29 seats in the state.
Moreover, in Chattisgarh the party won only one seat out of the 11 seats overall. The grand old party also saw the state’s ex chief minister Bhupesh Baghel losing the poll battle. Not only that, the grand old party also lost around 2 percent vote share.
A leader in Chhattisgarh Congress said, “The problem is with the system the leaders are being imposed with. The even greater problem is that Rahul Gandhi is not getting the right feedback at the top which is misleading top leadership. We are getting votes because of Rahul Gandhi and because people want to vote for Congress. They are not voting us because of our strategy.”
A senior Congress member holding a high position in the party said, “In Karnataka, which is ruled by Congress, there was an understanding on around three seats which was lost away, and on top of that there is an old tussle between chief minister Siddaramaiah and deputy chief minister DK Shivakumar of the Congress party. Both the camps did not want each other to perform well. We can say that, both the people worked less for the party more for themselves.”
In another important state Bihar, there is an understanding that the state unit president of the grand old party has been dancing on the tunes of Lalu Prasad Yadav whereas any kind of independent leadership in Congress would directly dent Lalu’s political existence. Therefore Lalu is cautious and wants to keep the Congress under his clutches by instructing Congress’ Bihar president in most of the matters.
The Congress state unit president could soon be removed from his position as Rahul Gandhi is angry with his style of functioning.
Also, in Telangana where the Congress party is in power it could not deliver the promised numbers. The party informed the high command that it would win more than 10 seats, however the party could only reach eight seats. Apart from that, there were three more seats, Mahboobnagar, Secunderabad and Malkangiri, which the Congress was expecting to win but seems to have lost cheaply.