As Congress-SP alliance fails, 'UP ke ladke' confirm elders' concerns

Lucknow: The best fish swim near the bottom but the Congress has made it a habit of swimming at the top.

If the party has hit rock bottom in the UP assembly elections with seven seats, it should make sure that some heads roll at the top-especially those who had unrelentingly insisted on the alliance between Rahul Gandhi and Akhilesh Yadav — often described as UP ke ladke.

The discomfort of a section of party leaders has been evident since talks of alliance began. The Congress has made a remarkable beginning six months before the elections when Mr Rahul Gandhi embarked on his Kisan Yatra and UPCC president Raj Babbar and other leaders took out the ‘27 saal, UP behaal’ yatras.

After prepping the party cadres, the Congress went into a three month long silence and then emerged to strike an alliance with the Samajwadi Party. The forging of the alliance proved to be the undoing of the Congress whose leaders had a tough time explaining what happened to its ‘27 saal, UP behaal’ slogan.

The Congress wasted precious time, waiting endlessly for the Samajwadi dispute to get resolved and when it did formally announce the alliance, the election process had begun.

Its party workers had fallen back in the realms of despair. The Congress carried the burden of the anti-incumbency factor against the Akhilesh government and the alliance did not work at the grassroots level. Overlapping of candidates put a question mark on the alliance and the results prove it.

The defeat of senior Congress MLAs including Pradeep Mathur from Mathura, Anugrah Narain Singh from Allahabad, Vivek Singh from Banda and Ajay Kapoor from Kanpur are examples of this because they did not get SP votes.