 "Dismay and disarray in Congress camp")
On Friday, party leaders were reeling under the “Modi wave” and trying to come to terms with what had hit them. If a senior leader is to be believed, Congress President Sonia Gandhi was one of the few who knew the party’s performance would be its poorest ever and even contradicted the party leaders who tried to tell her otherwise at a stock-taking meeting last Monday.
Sonia Gandhi, clad in a black and grey sari and accompanied by her son and party vice-president Rahul Gandhi, addressed the media at 24, Akbar Road. She accepted responsibility for the defeat but made it a point to highlight her party did not compromise on its values and ideals, a reference to its secular credentials. Rahul Gandhi, under whose leadership the party went to polls this time, limited himself to “holding myself responsible”, adding there was “a lot to think about.”
The media and party workers had been wanting answers to certain questions from the Gandhis since noon, when the results tally made it clear a gargantuan defeat was staring the Congress in its face. But the duo did not take questions and left as quickly as they had appeared.
Members of the Congress Working Committee have been called called to meet on Monday.
Congress spokespersons, who had been officially briefed, tried hard to defend the party on television. But when they stepped out of the cubicles set up at the party office for a breath of fresh air, they could be heard admitting over the phone: “It’s very difficult, we won’t even touch 50.” Senior leaders who had gathered in an All-India Congress Committee room to take stock of the numbers as they came in disbanded by 11 am.
Publicly, they defended the “leadership”, saying it was a “collective failure” of the party — of the general secretaries — but internally they questioned the “newfangled” strategies of Rahul Gandhi (the primaries, for instance). His “non-political coterie” — the likes of Mohan Gopal from the Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Contemporary Studies — were also in the line of fire. “Those who have never even fought a panchayat election were deciding ticket distribution!” Among some opinions voiced by Congress leaders was that Nandan Nilekani, of the Unique Identification Authority fame, was given a ticket “overruling the ground realities in Bangalore South, where Saraswat Brahmins have only a marginal presence”.
Many within the party also grumbled about the upper hand given to close aides like Jairam Ramesh, who had “little ground connect”. While Ramesh has been ascribing the Congress failure to leaders being “found lacking in political communication”, a senior pointed out Ramesh was himself the officially-designated incharge of the party’s coordination centre.
The Congress could not even open its account in states like Delhi, Himachal, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Uttarakhand and Tamil Nadu.
In Andhra Pradesh, the party could win only two seats, while in the Telangana region, where it hoped to gain after bifurcation of the state, most the benefits were reaped by the Telangana Rashtra Samithi.
Most of the Congress’ sitting Union ministers, such as Kapil Sibal and Salman Khurshid, were defeated and it looked like a throw-back to December 2013, when adverse Assembly results in four of five states had the Congress leadership talking about introspection and strategy rectification. However, it seemed no lessons had been learnt in the past five months.