New Delhi: The Congress’ valiant efforts to challenge the Bharatiya Janata Party in 2019 Lok Sabha elections were stymised in the stunning second Modi wave with party president Rahul Gandhi failing to even retain his family pocketborough of Amethi where he dealt with a humiliating defeat by Union minister Smriti Irani. He lost by a margin of around 55,000 votes.
While in Madhya Pradesh, it won only one seat (Chindwara), in Chattisgarh it was leading in two seats and in Rajasthan and Gujarat not even one. The party failed to win any seat in Delhi and Haryana as well. Addressing a press conference on Thursday, Mr Gandhi refrained from going into the details of the party’s defeat and instead chose to congratulate Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP for the victory, saying that he respected the people’s mandate.
“I also want to congratulate Smriti Irani. She should now nurture the constituency with love,” Mr Gandhi said when asked about his defeat in Amethi.
He won from Wayanad, Kerala, with a record lead of 431,770 votes over his nearest rival, CPI’s P.P. Suneer. When asked about whether he would take responsibility for his party’s dismal record overall, the Congress president gave a cryptic reply, saying that this was between him and the Congress Working Committee (CWC).
Though speculation was rife that Mr Gandhi offered his resignation to his mother and former Congress president Sonia Gandhi, Congress sources rubbished it as baseless.
This was the first general election that the Congress fought under Mr Gandhi’s presidentiship during which the Congress president had himself launched a frontal attack on Modi, coining the term, “Chowkidar chor hai”.
Many analysts now say that the attack on the BJP should have been on the government’s policies rather than on the “personality cult” of the Prime Minister and that this backfired.
At the time of going to press, the Congress had managed to get only 50 LS seats, an increase of mere seven seats from its 2014 tally of 44.
To say that the results were unexpected is to state the obvious. In the lead-up to the Lok Sabha elections, the Grand Old Party seemed to be on the path of revival after it won three crucial Hindi heartland states of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chattisgarh, besides giving a spirited fight in Mr Modi bastion of Gujarat.
But the gains of the Assembly polls seem to have been lost all too soon. In these four states the party failed to barely open its account.
