Image Courtesy:thehindu.com
Congress President Sonia Gandhi has firmly told her party colleagues to take stock of what has gone wrong and not to soften the blow of the party’s loss in the recent Assembly elections by calling the results “disappointing”. According to a report in The Hindu, Gandhi has set up a group to analyse the results and said that the party needs to know why it “failed in Kerala and Assam”, and more importantly, why it drew “a complete blank,” in West Bengal. She told her colleagues to be ready for “uncomfortable lessons,” adding “if we do not face up to reality, if we do not look the facts in the face, we will not draw the right lessons.”
According to news reports, Gandhi said senior leaders from Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry and Bengal, where the party faced one of its worst poll fates yet, will be asked to “brief us, very frankly, on our performance… tell us why we performed well below expectation. These results tell us clearly that we need to put our house in order.”
The Trinamool Congress (TMC) retained power in West Bengal after one of the most aggressively communal electoral battles in the history of the state. But the electorate stood united and rewarded Mamata Banerjee another term with a vote share of nearly 50 percent! In Kerala The Left Democratic Front (LDF) won 97 seats, United Democratic Front (UDF) 41; and the BJP scored Zero. Puducherry, was another area of concern for the Congress where ex-partyman N Rangaswamy led his party the All India N.R. Congress to victory and is in alliance with the BJP. Puducherry was under President’s Rule after the collapse of the V Narayanasamy-led Congress government.
Gandhi was addressing the Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting on Monday, this is where the party’s decisions are made and plans of future actions discussed with the top leadership.
The HIndu reported that Gandhi sought the CWC’s opinion on appointing a full-time Congress chief by June-end as it had been planned before Covid-19 second wave hit India. Gandhi said that party’s Central Election Authority chief Madhusudan Mistry “had already worked out a schedule”. This is crucial as it was in 2020, that the party’s senior leaders including Anand Sharma, Shashi Tharoor, Ghulam Nabi Azad, and Kapil Sibal who had been asking that a “full-time” and “effective leadership” be in place and that it should “visible” and “active”. These, along with other leaders of the party had written Gandhi on the issue and called for an internal reform in the Congress.
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